19- Small Business Home page must have 16 elements

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In this episode, we discuss a blog post of “16 Must-Have Small Business Homepage elements” for the startup or entrepreneur. This blog post was published by John Jantsch of the Duct Tape Marketing program.

As the blog post points out: “…there are still many business owners who have the “make my site pretty” mentality. By not keeping SEO, content, strategy, user experience, website functionality, and design in mind, companies risk losing business opportunities.”

You, as a small business owner, must not forget what the purpose of a web site is for —

to get found;
to build trust;
to educate;
to inform;
to nurture; and
to convert.

Since the visitor to your homepage will form a first impression of you and your small business, John Jantsch lists and describes in his blog post the 16 “must-have” elements for a web site home page:

A promise
A sub-promise
A call-to-action
Contact details
Visual branding
Video
List of problems
Trust Elements
Changing content
Mobile optimization
Personality — the “have fun” element
Social proof
Clear path
Content upgrades
Core services, and
A resource menu

And John elaborates a bit on each of these sixteen elements.

Perhaps you can use this checklist to see if your own home page contains all of these or lacks some of them. You can also try to get feedback on how well they perform each of these elements.

By the way, in the blog post, John is also offering a free web site review from Duct Tape Marketing. So you now have a specialist who can give you free feedback on the effectiveness of your home page. And we hope that you can pass this test with flying colors.