Building a Successful Homepage

A site's homepage is the first page the user stumbles upon and it gets most of the search engine's focus. This article will summarize several important points one should remember when constructing a homepage.
The 'ultimate' goal of a website is to sell – service, product, incoming contact, a specific reaction – and a homepage must summarize effectively what the site has to offer. In layman's terms, to (positively) 'capture' the user. A person, who wasn't able to find what he was looking for right away, will just skip to the next website, considering the options the web can provide.
In most cases, a webmaster is able to reach solid conclusions by simply surfing the web and the sites of his competitors, gaining inspiration from what other sites have to offer in terms of ease-of-use and accessibility.

Intro

Many sites choose to place an intro before actually entering the page. In most cases, it would be an animation or text for the user to watch before the main contents are viewable.
On the one hand, one can make an attractive entrance indeed, possibly 'selling' the product right away. On the other hand, modern users have grown tired of distractions, and if the contents aren't shown immediately, the entire site is rendered useless to them.
Another important aspect to remember is search-engine optimization, which consider the first page of the website as its homepage representing the entire site. In case the search engine doesn't find relevant contents on the page, it may decide the entire site is irrelevant to the user.
It is advised to put some thought in case you've decided to place an intro: what contents will it include? What would the size of it be, so it won't be too heavy to load? Will it include keywords for search engines? Would hasty users be able to skip it?
Feel free to browse websites with and without intro, and see how to place it without accidentally annoying your user.

Aesthetics

The homepage, if not the entire website, ought to be presented in a pleasant way.
This does not necessarily mean you should hire a web-designer (even though sometimes it's a worthy investment), it means that you should put some time and thought in deciding how the homepage would look and making the needed arrangements early on, allowing you to end up having a good-looking website.
One of the best ways of designing a website is to sketch it on a piece of paper. This way, you will have some tangible image of how the website should look. When seeing it, it's much easier to achieve it.
In practice, one should consider reading about color-matching and decide on how much moving elements (flash, animations, banners, flickering colors) could be included without creating a nuisance.
The latest trend in website design is clean, slick websites. No sharp color-changes, no flashy colors and no distracting animations. Many users had learned to separate the wheat from the chaff, no matter how attractive the latter may be.

Displaying contact information

Statistics prove that successful websites that sell a product or a service clearly display their 'offline' contact information in a central location of their homepage.
Not everyone trusts the Internet completely, therefore simply displaying your contact information (telephone number, address, fax or other forms of communication) significantly help in building trust towards your website. The untrusting user sees he has someone to talk to, even if he doesn't actually contact you. It adds to your credibility.

Call to action

Considering the fact that our website is supposed to sell something, the homepage must be built to reflect that and point the user to the right direction.
The user must understand at all times what is expected of him – what he should press, where he should go. When feeling stuck, most users will just continue to the next website.
Your potential customer must know what are you selling him and how to reach it. A big plus would be reaching it in a minimal number of clicks. The practice of on-site Internet Marketing optimization is based around the ability to transform every aspect of the website into a seller. 

Content

Those who deal with internet marketing have coined the term “content is king”.
This attitude reflects the simple fact that the contents are the most important thing on a website. For that, one should seriously analyze the contents of their homepage and how they are being displayed.
The homepage should include information about the company, the product or service being sold and present it in a fashion that would 'sell' it right away.
To demonstrate its importance, we can share that when hiring a writer to add contents, they will surgically inspect each and every word, not forgetting its placement. In a similar manner, a web promoter will count the density of the words so the keyword density will be just right – not too much, not too little.
The homepage must win in two fronts as one: winning the heart of your potential customer as well as fitting into the requirements of search engines.
On the other hand, it is best to avoid creating a cumbersome homepage with too much information. If your website is not a news-site and you must scroll to see the bottom of it, it's safe to bet that your homepage is too long. For 90% of the homepages, there is no real justification in making the user scroll down.

Navigation

This is one point that is being often overlooked or forgotten. It is easy to rely on a centralized menu and forget about internal linking.
Internal links are of utmost importance for both the user and the search engine: the text should contain internal links where applicable.
For example, if you're selling a 34'' TV set which you advertise on your homepage, it would be unreasonable to send off your user to find it in the menus (a common case would be “Electric Appliances” >> “Televisions” >> “Sony” >> “From 21'' to 42''” and so on). Instead, the word, words or image should be linked to the product page.
Internal linking helps the search engine to properly categorize your site and decide upon its relevance as well.
Make certain that your user will reach every destination in a minimal number of clicks (more than 4 clicks is a whole lot).
Also, consider making outbound links (to other websites) open in a new window, so your website wouldn't be 'replaced' by the target of the link.

Background music and sound effects

A webmaster should seriously put thought into the real need of playing music or other sounds when entering the website.
Once a useful gimmick, sound effects could be a nuisance to the user, if they cannot control it. In many cases, music playing is a satisfactory reason to hit that 'X' button in the corner.
Should you play music to the user? Is it necessary and relevant? Will it possibly annoy the user or their surroundings? A good example are users who surf at their workplace or unaware of their volume, causing the website to become unwanted in an instant manner.
A user would expect to hear sound when entering a site dedicated to a band or promoting a movie, but not when entering a virtual store or a business card. Also consider that many users play their own music of choice, and adding a second layer to that will only interfere.
In any case, think through before 'taking over' the user's speakers. If you do, at least do it in a thoughtful and considerate way, allowing the user to stop the audio at any time. We believe most would prefer their users to click the stop button than closing the page... 
 
To summarize, the webmaster should put the interest of his clientele as the most important thing to uphold.
To win the contest over the user's interest, the website should be easy to understand and fun to use. In that, the homepage takes most of the focus. Clever homepage construction will invite the user in, comfortably, and turn them into a customer.
Note that your homepage is essentially the face of your business. It represents you, so make sure it does so in the best way possible.

Good luck!