Last time we talked about the process of figuring out who it was you want your website to communicate with. In this post, we are going to explore topic in more depth.

Now that you have a general idea of who you want your website to communicate with we need to do two more things. Firstly, we need to figure out how to communicate with the most important groups on your home page and secondly, we need to segment the categories down into more specific categories (don’t worry, I’ll explain that in more depth as we go.)

Your home page is the front page of your website and is therefore the one page of your website that most people will see. Because of this, you want to make sure that you are using your home page to communicate with the group that you determined was most important to you. Let’s keep the three categories of visitors from the last post and assume that you want to communicate with potential customers, current customers, and some partners you have in the community. Let’s say that you have also determined that communicating with potential visitors is the most important category of customer you need to speak to.

Generally speaking, you want to make sure that you have something on your home page that speaks to every group that would be coming, however, you definitely want to make sure that  the most obvious, eye-catching parts of your website are communicating with your primary target. This means that you should use splashes of color and images to draw the attention of the visitors you are most trying to communicate with. Using our example, you would want to make sure that the most obvious message on your home page communicates with potential visitors, but that you have something on your home page for your current customers as well, and maybe you can put a link in the footer or on your menu for vendors and partners.

This seems like an incredibly simple process to think through, and it is. Unfortunately though, many people don’t take the time to think through who is going to be coming to their site so that they can craft their home page and the messages on their home page to that group of people.