The homepage of a B2B website has to do some heavy lifting. It is the most common entry point for the site and must satisfy the needs of different groups of visitors – customers, potential customers, job seekers, investors and media/analysts.
The homepage is a jumping-off point for all of these visitors to find the information they are seeking. Visitors arrive on your homepage and actively search for the link that will take them to what they want.
Is your homepage designed to make it easy for these visitors to find what they are looking for?
Most B2B homepage designs are very similar – a large billboard ad in the middle, the logo in the top left, and three or four vertical columns of images and text. A recent report on B-to-B Web Site Homepage Design by Marketing Sherpa found that 80% of B2B websites use the same basic design layout.
Is this layout effective? The Homepage study analyzed the homepage of some large B2B technology companies which have this layout. The study used eye-tracking to compare the company designs to some modifications to the original design.
The results confirmed their suspicions. Visitors to a homepage find little value in large billboard images and find multiple columns difficult to navigate. One specific finding is that fewer columns with more text is better. People don’t read web pages, they scan, and scanning down a single column is easier than reading across multiple columns.
The Homepage study provides many more practical details about what visitors to a homepage find most effective. These details make for fascinating reading if you are facing some hard decisions about improving your homepage design and want to make these decisions based on hard evidence.
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