How to write a great home page & keep people on your site!

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. Welcome to my first class, which is all about how to write a great home page that keeps people on your website a little bit about me before we start. I'm a freelance copywriter on In case any of you aren't sure exactly what that means, let me explain. What I do is I write copy. Now the next question is walked. His copy a copy is what you will see. Any time you open up a brochure or you read an advert or you look at a business website, the text that you're seeing is called copy. So over the years, I have written websites have written brochures. I've written blog's press releases, case studies. I've written product copy, which is the little blurbs that you'll find in a catalogue when you look at a product or on a website. When you look at a product, uh, Britain brand descriptions, brand names, taglines, all kinds of things I've written for a variety of different businesses, from coffee companies, Teoh furniture retailers to construction companies. Although in the last few years most of my work has bean for technology businesses. Writing Web pages on whole websites is one of the main things that I do. Which Swire thought great place to start with B home pages because this is the most important page off your website is the first impression that you give of your business. You don't need to have any prior knowledge of writing websites or of marketing or off copyrighting To understand this class by the end of this class, you should have a much better idea of what things to consider when you're writing a home page. What things to include on the home page on how to make it so good that visitors to your website will stay on your website and will continue to explore it. Continue learning about your brand on will become interested in your products and your services. There is also a class project, which is all about how to write a headline for a home page. Please, do you follow my profile and if you like this class, then please do write me review on. Please do post your class projects in the Project gallery so I can take a look if you're interested in finding out a little bit more about me and my work on my client's on seeing some examples of my work. Then please do visit my website, which is Christopher writes copy dot com. I hope you enjoy this class. 2. The hierarchy of information and the point of a home page: so the first thing I'm going to talk about is the hierarchy of information on your website on the point of your home page hierarchy of information. That sounds quite complicated, but actually it's not. All it means is that your website should progressively get more detailed as the visit to go , so long as they explore the site. So the top tier of information on your website by the top tier I mean what's on the home page That should be quite general. It shouldn't be too detailed. It should be quite brief and quite concise. If the visitor wants more information, they click through to other pages, and those pages get more detailed and they get longer. Was the point of a hierarchy of information. Well, it makes your site easy to read and easy to navigate. The last thing a person wants is to click onto a website on on the first page, be bombarded with really detailed information and not really know where to go to find the answers that they won't cause that's why they come to your website. They want answers to the hierarchy of information that stops people from clicking away from your website because they can't find what they need. Attention spans of people using the weather, getting shorter and shorter every day. So you need to get to the point fast, particularly on the home page. So what is the point of a home page? And what are the main things home page should do? I think that there are three main things home page should do. Firstly, it should welcome people to your site. Secondly, it should sum up what your site is about. Thirdly, it should identify what your site offers to the reader. So your home pages 1,000,000 introduction to your business, what you then need. It's a very clear and well thought out menu to help your visitors get to where they need to be. 3. Common mistakes home page writers make: So let's talk about some off. The common mistakes that I made by writers off Home page is one of the main problems. Is that there too detailed there, too wordy? They're not concise enough and not enough thought has been given to the hierarchy of information principle. So a visitor gets confused. They don't find the answers that they need and then click away many websites and many home pages are not visited. Focused. They should be about the visitor on about what the visitor wants and needs, rather than just about the company. You should be talking about what your visitor is looking for rather than just talking about yourselves. Another big problem with home pages and with websites in general, in some cases is that there's too much focus on features and not enough on benefits features. Who cares? Who cares what something conduce? What the visitor actually wants to know is what that feature or what that product will serve it can do. For them, benefits are all about what's useful to the visitor. Many home pages don't answer visitors questions. You don't need to answer every question your visitor might have on your home page that your visitor has come to your website with questions with needs that they want fulfilling. That's why they come to you. But if you don't address those questions and don't acknowledge that they have those questions on your home page, they're going to think that you don't really do what they need you to do, and they're gonna click away. Many home pages go for the hard sell by now because we're great, but people hate being sold to. They want to know how you can solve their problems. Now I've talked about how your copy on your home page shouldn't be too detailed. It should be quite broad and quite general. However, you can go too far the other way by being too vague. I've encountered a lot of B two B technology websites on business consultancy websites that talking really vague, really flowery language. So the kite kinds of things I mean is things like we make your business better or we help you increase profits. How surely every B two B business can say that you do need to give some specifics, not too much, not too detailed, but don't be too vague. Other problems with with home pages by design, bad layout. This is the first impression a visitor is getting of your business and first impressions count. So image Joyce is important, and you need to have an easy to read. Lay out some home pages. Don't have any copy it all. I've seen some home pages that are 100% images and maybe have the company logo on. The reason that they do this is because they think their images are strong enough on their own. However, what I've always said is, while images may grab attention, it's words that keep it. You do need to tell the visitor about your business, and water can offer them, and you can't do that with images alone. 4. What to include on a home page: Now let's talk a little bit about good home pages on what kinds of things you should include on our home page. A reader has clicked on your website because they want to know something on the home page is the first thing they see. What they don't want to know at this point is all about your company's humble beginnings. As I said before, at this point, it should be about the visitor rather than about your company. So the first thing you need to do is know your target audience, and you need to know the kinds of questions your target audience might have coming to your website. What you then need to do is you need to answer those questions in the copy. As you can see from my website, I've being quite explicit with this question. Answer structure. You don't have to do it like this. You don't actually have to have questions and then answers to those questions. It can be mawr subtle than that. You just need to have those questions in the back of your mind, and you need to make sure those questions are addressed when you're writing the copy when you're thinking about what copy want to write and how you want to answer the visitors questions. You need to remember that you should be highlighting benefits, not features. You can go into more detail about features, although you always need to keep in mind the benefits. On other pages of the website, a lot of companies do struggle, sometimes with benefits and actually putting them into words. What I found is that the which means approach is quite useful. Your product has this great feature, which means it does this, this and this for the customer, so you can see it kind of forces you to spell out your benefits. It forces you to identify what your feature actually does for your customer on why it's useful. For as I've said, Don't go into too much detail here. Don't go into loads of detail about your products and your services and any office you've got on and your prices and certainly your company history. Your visitor doesn't need to know that at this point. Keep it quite high level. Andi by high level, that's that's a term that we use in the technology industry, but it essentially means what we were talking about earlier. High level means general, it means broad on your home page. You want to talk about the broad benefits of your product without going into loads of detail about the particular features off it and what those features conduce on the home page. You also need to be quite persuasive, so the copy needs to be quite sharp, quite engaging, because your purpose is to keep people on the site and to encourage them to click through to other pages on. They won't do that if your copy is really dry and really boring. Andi really worthy of the sentences should be brief. They should be concise. They should be sharp, and you should be using interesting language. You also need to make sure that your copy fits the company's style and tone. Andi is in keeping with the company's values again. Don't write too much. The home page is not the place for a really lengthy copy, however, do write some copy, then finally think very carefully about design on layout 5. Example of a home page I've written: I'm going to talk a little bit about some home page copy that I wrote for a company called Mawr letting center So you can see that the first thing we're doing is we're welcoming. The visitor to the site on the visitor is likely to be a landlord who has come to the site to find out why they should commission MAWR to manage their properties for them. That is the key question, and we're answering that question with these three benefits here. We then a little bit further down, go into a bit more detail about their services. On Dhere. We are using the which means approach to writing benefits as well earlier. So, for example, the feature off their service would be their membership off these various associations. Which means mawr can help landlords resolve disputes fast and stay up to date with the law . That is the benefit. We then have, uh, just a few bullet points about their particular services. Some information about their availability on how to contact them 6. Key takeaways: so the key takeaways from this class, you need to make sure that your home page is about your visitor on, not about you. You need to keep the copy quite high level. Not too long, not too detailed. However, you don't want it to be too vague or too fluffy, either You still want to make sure that your visitor knows what your company does and knows what your product or your service actually is. But save the more complicated detail for your other pages. You need to highlight benefits, not features, and you need to make sure your home page copy fits in with your company's tone. Your company's brand on is suitable for the target audience. Thank you for watching my class. I hope it was useful. Please. Now have a look at the class project on Post your Project in the Project Gallery. If you enjoyed this class, please write me a review on please. Obviously following my profile that will hopefully be more classes in the future. And if, as I mentioned at the beginning, if you would like to see some more examples of my work, will find out a little bit more about my clients and way my background. Then please, within my website, which is Christopher writes copy dot com. Thank you very much. I will see you against you.