There are websites that make you want to stay and visit for awhile and there are websites that you don’t. We’ve all visited both, but have you thought about why some websites just seem to work better than others?

Let’s take the example of two websites that sell cookbooks and see how one might go about selling them the right way and the other the wrong way. Once you break it down into its separate components, it’s easy to see what makes one website work and another one fail.

There is a cookbook for everything. There are cookbooks for ethnic foods, cookbooks for dieters, cookbooks for meat lovers and cookbooks for vegetarians. There must be thousands of topics to choose from. When someone goes to a website for the first time, they are not going to stay for a long time.

An experienced web designer is well-aware of this. He is not going to waste words on the homepage. He’s going to have professional copy that entices the reader to stay, but the emphasis is going to be on making it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for. His catalog of books will be the focus of the home page.

He will have the books all arranged into easily identifiable categories. Those visitors who are looking for cake decorating books will intuitively know which category they will find them under. Since cakes are desserts, the general category might have a link button that reads, ‘Delicious Desserts.’ If the reader is looking for Mexican recipes, the homepage category might say ‘Favorites from Around the World’ or something like that.

The website that you run from will make you scroll down the page while they explain in detail why their website is so wonderful. When you want to know how to decorate cake, you don’t want to have to scroll down a sidebar that lists each title in alphabetical order and hope to find one that sounds like it might be about what you’re looking for. On the homepage, this is a very bad idea. Keep it short and categorize your offerings.

Almost every website with a number of products has a search facility. However, this should not be thought of as a replacement for a well designed homepage. The visitor hasn’t come to a search engine – a search engine has already directed them to the site. If they typed ‘cake decorating designs‘ once in google, they don’t want to do it again on your site. Also, while you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you also want them to notice other books while you’ve got their attention.

In a nutshell, there are three elements to a winning homepage. Make an eye-catching, themed design, keep your content to a minimum and make your site easy to navigate.