Your “hero section” is the first thing people are going to see when they load up your website. This section is defined as the top portion of the homepage where everyone is automatically directed when they arrive on your site. It includes menus, graphics like photos and videos, and usually, some kind of call to action. The goal of the hero section is to entice your readers to move on down the homepage, or onto another of your pages.
Okay, so now we understand what the hero section is and what its goals are, we can move on to some of the ways we design hero sections to best direct traffic on your site.
Graphic design’s value in your hero section — We find it’s important to get the brand of your website established in the hero section. To do this, we create a layout that intertwines a color theme with media to represent your brand. Sound graphic design in your hero section puts your readers at ease, and makes them more likely to move on to more of the site.
Offer your readers something to do right away — If your readers arrive on your website and have no direction as to what they should be doing, it’s not likely you’re going to gain any value from their visit. Getting people to your site is the hard part, you don’t want them to leave before getting a chance to meet you. Presenting a call to action in this section is a very reliable way to push readers onto more of your content and potentially gather some information about readers. Calls to action could be as simple as presenting an offer and a click through button to another page. They can also be outfitted with contact forms to gather as much information from your readers as you desire. This information allows you to gain understanding of the demographics your website is bringing in. It also gives you the ability to market to those individuals who already expressed interest.
Menus: sometimes they’re ideal, sometimes they’re a distraction — Your website needs to have a menu to show your readers the options for navigation. The amount of attention your menu should get from your readers all depends on what your goals are for your website. If you want your readers to move down the home page and look at all your content the first time they arrive at your site, then concealing the menu with a button can be a great strategy to move readers down the page. If your brand is already established, and you want your readers to be more easily able to navigate to auxiliary pages, then having a prevalent menu is important.
Some examples of businesses that should be displaying their menus are service based industries where someone would come to your website looking for a particular service or information. By directing attention to your menu on sites like this, you’re making things more convenient for your readers.
If your website is more for people with exploratory mindsets, then suggesting them to navigate down your home page and showing off your content there is very beneficial. By employing this strategy, you make your homepage a place for people to learn a little bit about a lot of aspects of your brand without overwhelming them with too much information. Once they’ve looked through everything on the homepage, they feel empowered to delve deeper into subjects you’ve covered on the homepage.
These design choices are small individually, but in tandem with each other, they put readers in the proper mindset to navigate your website. Tucker CM Digital employs all these aspects of hero section design into all clients websites every day. It’s the small details in the design of your website that make or break the retention of your readers. We find it’s important to learn as much about the client we’re making a website for in order to create a design that gives people the best first impression of you.
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