What makes a good home page?

Your home page should tell any one who visits where to find the important information on your site. It is an important page because it is the first impression anyone gets of your site. If the page looks professional, interesting and doesn't do anything to put people off, they might hang about. If the page irritates because the pictures take too long to load, you play music for the sake of it, or the text is difficult to read, people will just give up and go way.

There are three main things that a home page should do: convey the site's purpose, describe what kind of information is on your site, and describe how to find the information.

Some things you might want to do with your homepage:

• Put the most important information near the top of the page; this makes sure everybody sees it
• Try to limit the information to two or three screens. Users get bored if they have to scroll very far
• Emphasise your most interesting or important information. For example, change the size, colour, or add animation. Minimize less important content
• Give some sort of site map or index. These are links to your main topic pages; they make it clear where you can go from here. This is especially important if you site covers lots of topics. You should probably make the links text links; graphics take to long to load
• Give users a way to contact you. This might be a phone number, a request for information form, an email address

In fact, most of these rules apply to all your pages.