Your website’s homepage is the portal to your online brand. If you nail the homepage, you’ll wow people from the start. Flop there, on the other hand, and you’ll find it very hard to overcome that poor first impression.
You can better your odds of success by learning a thing or two from what others are doing. Below are four compelling homepage designs worth studying and emulating.
Dillon Kyle Architects
The first thing visitors notice when they land on the site for Dillon Kyle Architects is the gorgeous full-screen visual that sits above the fold. The field actually uses a handful of images, and they change each time you refresh the page, but the simplicity of the graphic with the white text overlay is what gives this site its power.
Scroll down and you get access to a non-traditional menu that permits you to navigate to other pages. The simplicity of this homepage communicates the image Dillon Kyle Architects seeks to foster. It does a fine job of keeping visitors focused and engaged.
TYME
The TYME website is a fully functional ecommerce site that effectively informs visitors and guides them through an on-site conversion funnel one step at a time. Part of what makes the page so effective is the subtle color scheme and use of high-quality visuals throughout.
It’s also interesting to note the use of auto-play video at the top of the page. This draws people in and supplies a quick overview of what visitors can expect from the firm’s line of products.
Scroll below the fold and you’ll see ample social proof from real customers, as well as high-resolution images of an array of products with calculated CTAs that direct visitors to product-specific sales pages. Despite the variety of details the TYME homepage presents, it also does an excellent job of remaining simple and direct.
Porsche
When you develop a luxury product that can boast of world-class design, people expect a similar approach in every facet of your marketing and branding. In order for Porsche to promote a $90,000 car and stay consistent with the brand’s messaging, its team had to develop a website that reflects the sleek and refined style of the vehicle.
You have to give them an A+ for execution. The Porsche Panamera homepage is nothing short of gorgeous and immersive. It’s simple, yet surprisingly functional.
It has gorgeous full-screen visuals, video, parallax features, and a user experience that makes you want to stick around to find out what happens next. This homepage meets and also exceeds the expectations the Porsche brand has set.
Lensabl
The Lensabl homepage is unique in the way it catches a visitor’s eye from the start. The banner at the top features background video with different people wearing the brand’s products and making humorous faces.
It’s hard to arrive at this site and not feel as if you’re interacting directly with the people you see there. This uncanny level of humanization makes the website what it is.
This is also a remarkably simple homepage. It clearly explains the process of picking lenses and sending them off, which can tear down any barriers to purchase that may be present when the visitor has had no previous interaction with the brand.
Stay Up to Date on the Latest Trends
The web design industry is one of the fastest paced in business today. By the time you devise a new website and make all the necessary investments to get people to visit it, too often there’s a new best practice or a better way of doing things.
And though you can’t dodge the inevitability of design evolution, you can position yourself more effectively for success by studying what the people on the cutting edge are doing and adopting some of their principles in your own work.
The four homepage designs highlighted above should provide a fantastic starting point.
