9 vital tips to improve your corporate homepage

The majority of all corporate stakeholders enter the corporate website through the front door; your homepage. What do they expect? And how can you effectively guide them to the information they are looking for? In this article Jungle Rating will give 9 valuable tips to improve the effectiveness of your homepage.

Devote space to navigation

Each corporate homepage consists of two navigational menus; the main and the supporting navigation. The main navigation is located at the top of the screen on the majority of all websites. The supporting navigation is ideally located in the upper right corner of the homepage and guides visitors throughout their website visit.

Tips for an effective navigation

1. Restrict the number of items in the main navigation to six, as this will increase the surveyability of the main navigational menu. In order to provide an entrance to all stakeholders, the main navigation should at least consist of: about us, investors, press, corporate citizenship and careers.
2. The contrast of the navigational items should be clear; a dark font on a light surface.
3. The font size of the navigational menus should be at least comparable to Arial 10.
4. The supporting navigation should consist of at least the following elements: home, contact, FAQ, sitemap. Additional user-friendly items in the supporting navigation might be language (in case your homepage is bi- or multilingual), publications, font size (allow visitors with poor-eye-sight to adapt the font size to their preference) or help.

Provide topical information

The corporate homepage is the ideal location to inform stakeholders on topical matters. Most companies dedicate a specific section of their homepage to press releases and/or news items.

Tips for topical information

1. Introduce news and/or press releases with a clear header. Underscore the header and provide it with a distinguishing colour in order to make sure it is a link.
2. Provide an internationally accepted indication of the date. Not: 09/08/2006 or 08/09/2006, but: August 9, 2006 or 9 Aug, 2006.
3. Consider providing an indication of the exact time of the publication and your respective time-zone (e.g. 12:00 CET).
4. Make use of triggers in order to draw the attention of visitors to topical items. A trigger is a visual and textual depiction. It can be used to promote important corporate events (e.g. the publication of the annual (sustainability) report, analyst meeting, conference calls, a chat session with the CEO). Triggers are ideally located in the right-hand section of the homepage.
5. Create various triggers for one event, alternate the various triggers and find out - through your web statistics - which version attracts the attention of your visitors. By monitoring trigger effectiveness you will know what attracts the attention of your visitors.

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