When it comes to a home page for your small business, it’s got to make sense for a visitor who has never heard of you before. Visitors are in and out of home pages in a few seconds, and most of what they take in is the layout of the home page. A poor layout for your home page will result in no one finding out about all your great work.

1. Lead with what you do, not who you are

Opening with the company’s story is a common mistake made by many small businesses. The first thing that potential customers need to know is what you do and who you do it for. Even better is a sentence that outlines what you do for them. This can form the basis of your homepage’s content and should be at the top of the page in a clear, prominent position. Only later can you tell them the story of your company.

2. One primary action, not five

Every homepage should have one primary action on it. This can be to call, book, browse or enquire with a business. However, many websites have five or more calls to action on them, which means that there is no primary action. Visitors will do none of them because there is nothing that stands out as the obvious next step for them.

3. Navigation should answer “where do I go” instantly

Menu labels that make sense to the business owner may not make sense to a first time visitor to your site. Therefore, the business owner must write the menu labels as if they were writing for a first time visitor. Using clear, ordinary language is far more effective than clever labelling. If someone has to guess what a menu item leads to, then that is unnecessary friction in the user experience that you caused.

• 4. Visual hierarchy does the work text alone can’t

The size, spacing and contrast between elements is used to show the visitor what is most important to them. This is in addition to the actual copy written on the page. A page of equal sized and spaced text with no contrast will have the visitor reading the whole page before determining what is most important to them. Importantly, most visitors will not even read the whole page.

5. Above the fold still matters, even on mobile

The half-truth that “above the fold” does not matter any more because people scroll is shown to be wrong in this test. People will scroll down a page if there is a reason to do so but what is above the fold without scrolling will determine whether or not they bother to read the rest of the page. For mobile, the above the fold space is smaller but more valuable.

6. Test it on someone who’s never seen it

This is a really simple test to check the UX of your homepage. Get someone who has not viewed your business before to view your homepage. Watch where they click and where they seem to be stuck for a while. This is real data about your homepage and about your design of your homepage. Good. Use this before you start to redesign your homepage, not after you have finished. Good layout isn’t about following trends and can be completely different from your competitors. However, the goal of the layout is to take away as many decisions from the visitor as possible in order for them to complete the goal they came to the website for.