Your homepage is your storefront.
The portal into your universe.
The door to your offering.
It’s useful to think of your website’s home as the typical experience in a brick and mortar shop.
After all, online stores haven’t been around nowhere as long as traditional establishments. And we humans typically have a hard time disassociating what’s so familiar from the new.
Want to know how to think about your homepage so you can retain and convert as many visitors as possible?
Professor and author David Hawkins has got a few unconventional “Rules for success” to share (from the book “Success is for you”):
- Everyone has to go to the bathroom.
- Everyone’s feet hurt.
- Everyone has other things bothering them.
- Everyone’s lost and wants someone to connect with them, to guide them, and to be there in person in this experience.
- Everyone’s hungry.
Do you get it?
The same human impulses that guide us in our day to day, affect our online buying experience. And we should treat our online assets accordingly.
Think of your typical visitor like if they’re stepping into a clothing store:
They swing open the door to the clothing store and are hit with that new-clothes smell. Immediately, they’re thinking, “Bathroom. Now.” But their feet are killing them – wrong day to break in new shoes. Stomach’s growling like a bear, too. Their brain’s buzzing with a million other things, and now they’re here, lost in a sea of denim and discount racks. They just wish someone would swoop in, point them in the right direction, maybe even give them a snack.
Talk about retail therapy, right?
This is how you should see anyone landing on your homepage.
It’s about urgency, need, motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic), convenience, clarity, guidance, and satisfaction.
The effort it will require you to make up for all of these factors and considerations in your copy and UX, will guarantee 10x the returns.
Quote and reflection of the day:
“We cannot change what is going on in a movie by running up to the screen, trying to push the characters around. Even a child would laugh at that. Yet that’s what the whole world is doing all the time, isn’t it? With one little shift of the heart, the entire movie changes. The best the head can do is change the scenario or improve the quality of the production. But no real change takes place until one changes the heart of the matter. That is where the power exists.”
- David R. Hawkins, Success Is for You
True power lies in the emotions and in the thinking behind your actions. Change how you react and how you think to control your reality.
