1. Small Logo

At one time there was a trend where a visitor was forced to watch a 15 second animation of a business logo before the home page was displayed. Wiz, bang, wow! The animation and sound effects were very hip and cool. However, it wasn't long before marketing statistics came in showing that visitors just wanted to find product or service information and found flying, animated logos annoying. Today the trend is to have a small logo in the upper right corner with top navigation. The Apple Computer website is one such example with a small Apple icon on the menu bar and nothing more. After all, customers know where they are, and your efforts a focusing a visitors attention are better used to get them to buy something than to see how cool your logo looks in 3D.

2. Billboard Design

MentalityWhen you are driving down a highway at 65 mph you only have a few seconds to read a giant billboard. Billboard marketers make the best of this with short, concise messages and images with impact. This same approach can be used on the top half of a home page. Today's web surfers have about as much focus as someone driving down the highway. You have just seconds to make an impact on a first time visitor and this is the reason for large 'splash images' and slide shows that we see in almost all big business websites. Each slide is almost like a billboard with a focused image and message. 

3. Headlines and Bullets

It is a win-win situation. Google loves the HTML code that goes behind making a headline (H1 or H2 tags) as well as bullets (which are called unordered lists with UL tags). Site visitors also find short headlines and bullet points helpful as many of them have short attentions spans. You can summarize selling points and content with headlines, sub-heads and bullet points making Google and your visitors happy. 

4. Consistant Elements

Good design is based on Gestalt principles of balance and symmetry. Having only a couple of solid colors on your web pages gives the page both a polished look and allows the market focused items to pop from the page. 

5. Conversion Tunnel & Call to Action

Although I love designing beautiful clean websites, I think it is more important to focus on making sites effective. Often the primary purpose of the site is to sell something. If so, the focus of the upper half of the home page should center around this primary goal. Make the steps as easy as possible to get the customer to buy the product, fill out a form, or call a phone number. This is done through a call to action and conversion funnel. 

6. Ease of Use

Determine the primary reason for your site and the action you want a visitor to take when seeing your home page. Focus on simp lying this task as much as possible. If you have 10 different calls to action a customer will be overwhelmed. This is much like the billboard mentality of point two.

7. Fat Footers for SEO

The bottom of a webpage is generally referred to as the footer. Classically these were used for simply navigation or just a copyright notice. But today the footer area has grown in size and loaded with information that Google loves. The focus is now on loading this area with keyword relevant words an links.