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For the Online Service, the home page is a Landing Page. It's job is to sell the trial. Here is a good example of an effective home page, complete with the opinions of fourteen smart conversion marketers.

"A mere 6 to 12 words stand between you and a lower bounce rate." This is how Joanna Wiebe begins a very comprehensive tutorial on writing your home page headline.

Home pages are hard. They have to deliver to a broad audience, and audience that could be visiting for almost any reason. However, half of our traffic comes to them on average. So, we need to get some things very right.

The first thing to focus on is the headline.

Of course, my primary advice is to hire someone like Joanna to write it for you, but if you aren't open to that, this is the best post I've seen on the topic.

Site as a Service Home pages have one purpose: To get visitors to become "tryers" of your application. In general, we want to be as efficient as possible, asking for only the required information to join a trial. Then we let email carry the mail. Lander offers an interesting experience on their home page. This treatment requires several clicks when one would suffice. This does two very important things: It conveys a sense of the company's personality and brandIt discourages poorly qualified visitors making their list convert to buyers betterThis is a good trade-off a lower conversion rate (to tryer) and improving the quality of a list.

This article is almost impossible to read because of an animated image in the center of the text. Fortunately, this is not a mistake. It underscores that adding motion to your pages makes it hard to focus on the message of the page.

I hope you'll get a chuckle from this as I did.

In my book Your Customer Creation Equation I talk about the two conversions that online services have:Conversion from visitor to trialConversion from tryer to buyerI recommend that online services find ways to get the visitor started as soon as possible. Online services have the advantage that we can try the product right there online.

This article is further proof that getting the visitor engaged with questions is a more effective way to find more tryers and buyers than the typical home page.

 @peeplaja - This is about as complete a summary of home page best practices that I've ever seen. Peep could have made this an eBook. There are some great examples, specific recommendations and tons of links to other resources. This ambitious post covers:Map out buyer personasCraft a value propositionBuild a connectionUse proper visualsDefine most wanted actionCreate call to actionWrite user oriented copyAdd trust elementsTest lengthCheck load speed

@widerfunnel "We have tested rotating offers many times and have found it to be a poor way of presenting home page content." Enough said.

Businesses love rotating banners because they are cowards. They are afraid of picking something and running with it. They don't want to lose a chance to get everyone. Well, when you try to sell to everyone, you sell to no one. If you won't listen to me, please, read Chris Goward's article. When it comes to testing, the Wider Funnel people konw what they're doing.  

 @ashocka18 has written an article for designers working on landing pages. In the process Heidi has linked to some very helpful posts.

I was struck by the way she laid out the article, perfect for those of us who scan. Your landing pages should be designed to help scanners find the salient points of your copy... like where the link to my post is.

I especially love the banner images for each topic. Very fun. Boring Call to Action Button Lame Logos Inconsistency Too many fonts Random colors Spacing fails Cheesy stock photos (I call this "Business Porn") Overuse of photoshop effects Icons from everywhere Readability issues Navigation Check it out.

 @smexaminer While images are important for social media to help break through the noise, they are also very important on our landing pages, home pages and other web pages.

Unfortunately, we often resort to what I call "business porn" in my book. Business porn includes stock photos of multi-racial smiling people, of graphs going up and to the right, and of cheerful women with headsets.

So if you are struggling with what to use for visuals on your site or in your emails, here are 26 excellent ideas. 

It's like 1995 on the mobile web right now. In the 90s, we were feeling our way through the process of defining what a "web page" should be, mostly by just launching things.

Now we find ourselves in our own 1994 on the mobile web, trying to figure out what a "mobile experience" is.

Right down to how the navigation should work.

If you're struggling with how to present menus on a small screen, this article should help. My partner in CRO, Joel Harvey, will be spilling the beans on what we've been finding in our tests at Conversion Conference 2015.

Do you have a ticket yet?

 @KISSMetrics makes the point that plain is the new sexy; conventional websites sizzle. This article offers scientific proof that we consider a website "sexy" if it presents information as we expect it. You don't need to pay a creative team to come up with a unique site. In fact you will probably have to reel them in a bit once you've completed this article.

It is astounding that these rotating hero shots are so common on e-commerce sites. We have seen in the lab that they are a sure way to reduce site engagement and crater conversion rates. Don't believe it? Tim Ash would know and lists the reasons in this eye-opening article. Please read it.

There is more on hero sliders in my most recent Search Engine Land column.

So, should you use a carousel, those rotating hero images now found at the top of most B2B and B2C websites?

The answer is "carefully."

This clever little site illustrates the reasons rotating banners are so frustrating. The timing, the amount of text and the order all come into play.

We have been able to tune a rotating hero on an ecommerce site so that it outperformed a static image. But it took several test cycles and didn't work in every case.

Have a little chuckle at yourself and enjoy the content on this site -- if you can read fast.

This is a great example of a Humanistic home page and Web site.

Nice summary of my ProductCamp Austin presentation.