Summarize what your company and Web site is about, so that visitors know what to expect (this also helps the Web site place well in search engines).

Include hyperlinks to your major content categories. This also helps visitors easily navigate the site.

Attract visitors’ attention. One way effective Web sites do this is to highlight key content from pages within the site (and provide links to the content) and also list what’s new on the site. Special sales or event info can also attract visitors’ attention.

Keep the content on your home page short. Each featured section should contain only a couple of lines of text with one or two small images.

Place the most important content at the top of the page. Visitors may never scroll down to catch the rest of the page if the content at the top isn’t of interest to them, so make sure to put your best content first.

Choose content that reflects the feel of your company or organization.

Think like a visitor and choose your content accordingly. Why would someone come to your site, and what can you do to make it easier for them to find exactly what they want?

To improve the attractiveness of your home page, you usually want to:

• Use your company logo. Keep the logo small, place it in a consistent location with a consistent size, and consider saving it as a transparent GIF using a standalone image editor so that the logo isn’t outlined with a solid color. If you don’t have a company logo (or have one in computer-readable format), consider hiring a graphics professional to create one.
• Use the same colors you use in other media. It’s important that your company or organization provides a consistent look to visitors. If your Web authoring tool lets you, the best way to achieve consistency is by applying a color scheme to pages using an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), which is linked to all your pages.
• Don’t overload your home page with content. Overloading your home page makes it difficult for visitors to find the most important links and information, so choose some key elements to display and leave the rest of the page blank.
• Have good visual flow. Design your pages to attract the eye to the entire page, not just a single part of it. But be careful not to overload your page.
• Make sure that your home page (and other pages on your site) loads quickly even over a slow Internet connection. In general, pages should take less than 15 seconds to download over a 28.8Kbps modem. Microsoft FrontPage, the most popular Web authoring tool, gives an estimate of how long it will take to download the currently open page in the lower right side of the FrontPage status bar, at the bottom of the screen.

One other crucial but overlooked part of designing an effective home page is preparing your site for search engines. In addition to submitting your site to the most popular search engines (like Yahoo and AltaVista), you should add some special HTML codes to your home page that tell search engines how to deal with your Web site.

These special codes are called meta tags (or meta variables). Meta tags store information about your Web site, such as a description and keywords, which some search engines use to determine when to display your Web site in a list of search results, as well as how to display your site. Refer to your Web authoring tools online help for step-by-step instructions for adding meta tags to your home page.