Artists – Is your home page holding you back?

Your website home page or landing page is the most important page on your website. Why? It’s your first impression to anyone who visits your site. It’s where people decide whether to leave or stay and look around. It has to be perfect.

Unfortunately, many artists and creative professionals do themselves a great disservice with their home page, and thus lose business and prospects.

The main problems I have found on creative websites can be broken into these three categories:

1. Home page takes too long to load:

There is nothing worse than having a slow loading home page. I believe that for many people this is the single biggest reason why you have poor results from your website. These days people take seconds or less to decide whether to stay on a site or leave. It is imperative that your home page loads quickly.

This is especially a problem with artist and photographer websites because we all like to show off nice large images or beautiful flash slideshows on the front page.

Solution: My advice is to get rid of the flash. Sorry, I know a lot of you may hate to hear that (I once wanted a flash site also), but for most people flash takes too long to load and they leave. Also, with flash you can often only see one image at a time - you want to give people an overview of your work at first glance and entice them to take a closer look on another page of the site. On your home page, stick with smaller images and a link directing traffic to your portfolio. And if you insist on having a flash portfolio, do yourself a favor and include a regular image portfolio too. Search engines prefer images over flash anyway.

2. Home page is confusing and cluttered:

No need to elaborate on the problem much - too many links, too many colors and unconventional layout make a home page confusing.

Solution: Decide on the number one goal of your home page and then make sure that you set it up accordingly. Here are some goals to consider: capture visitor email addresses, send visitors to portfolio, sell a specific product, get visitors to answer a survey. An important side note: research of eye movement during internet use has shown that most people intuitively look at the upper right side of the page first upon entering a website. Use this to your advantage and situate key page elements accordingly. It’s a great place for a newsletter opt-in box, for example.


3. Home page is unconventional:

As creative people, many of us tend toward the unconventional. In creativity that may be a good thing, in home page design it certainly is not. When I visit your site I expect to be able to navigate easily without a thought.

Solution: Look at large successful websites for guidance on how to layout your own site. There is no need to re-invent the wheel here. Be creative in your use of colors, icons, fonts, etc, but not in the basic anatomy of your home page. For example, there are only two places for the location of your primary navigation bar - across the top of the page underneath the title bar, or on the upper left side of the page. Look at successful sites, take notes, and apply them to your own site.
Apply these solutions to your own website and you’ll see improved traffic, page views, and time on site, along with more sales & email sign-ups.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks for reading!

This article is copyright ©Chris Kennedy, 2009.

Chris Kennedy owns and maintains PrintThatImage.com, a specialty printing site for giclée prints, fine art printmaking, gallery wrap canvas prints, and promotional products for professional artists and photographers. His office is located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.