Once you’ve come up with that one great idea that you want to share with the rest of the world, your best bet at actually exposing it to a global audience is a killer website. The website needs to be every bit as great and noteworthy as your idea, because nobody is going to bother reading all about your idea if it’s delivered through a roughshod-looking webpage.

Unfortunately, if you’re like most people – your first step would be to hop on a portal that offers free wordpress themes and download a multipurpose template that can bring your idea to life. This is going about things the wrong way.

A wordpress theme should never be the starting point in the journey to bring your great idea to life.

First Impressions Last, So They Need to Come First

Visitors are not going to bother poring through your content or browsing all the other sections in your website, if their first impression of your website is not positive. You have to make sure that visitors immediately feel welcome when they first click through your site, and that your site inspires trust at first glance.

In order to do this, you need to first define your plans. Think of the story you want to tell using your website, what you feel visitors should think upon first seeing your homepage. Take your time at this stage, as its normal for proper planning to take time. Rushing could result in failure to realize the ideas inside your head.

Plan in Advance

Start from scratch and formulate a plan. Avoid buying or downloading the first beautiful wordpress theme you come across. You need to take strategy and execution into account. First, you need to think of your goals and objectives. Try to come up with a list of the following:

• Who is your target audience?
• What problems or needs does this target audience have?
• What is your proposed solution for these problems?
• Do you have social proof?
• How do you convince the visitors to become a subscriber?

List your answers, you can have as many answers as you want but once you’ve listed them all, narrow it down so that you’ll have a solid actionable gameplan.

Decide on the Tone of the Website and Create a Flowchart

Once you have an idea of the kind of people you want your website to cater to, you need to further categorize and segment them (e.g. by age, by interests, by gender, etc.) so that you can create a flowchart for each. Different subcategories within your audience will want to visit different parts of your website, so it helps to have an idea as to how you can guide them and service their needs properly. You have to make all of them happy and satisfied, because those two feelings are the hallmarks of a visitor who will convert and come back for more.

Prioritize User Experience

Now that you have an idea of where your readers will most likely flock to, you need to design your navigation around making it easier for them. Have you ever visited a website or open a program where you don’t know where to go, or what the buttons do? It’s a frustrating experience and chances are you gave up before even experiencing what they have to offer.

Keep that scenario in mind when designing your website. Make sure navigation flows naturally from one section into the next, and try your best to ensure that people can get to where they want to go in the shortest amount of time and effort.

Don’t Forget to Introduce Yourself

Your website should have written content. It shouldn’t be all text, but it should have some text because you need to give people content to read and search engines something to index. The first types of content you need to produce are an About Me write-up. When people want to know more about you, this is the part of the page that they will visit.

When writing your About Me text, you should practice brevity. Keep it short, but informative enough so that people will understand who you are and what the website does for them. Avoid stuffing text with keywords, because this SEO strategy is already outdated and can even backfire – people and search engine these days can easily recognize when you try to game the system and will be turned away.

Match Your Design Strategy to a WordPress Theme

With all of the previous points already taken care of, you probably already have a basic idea of what your home page does, what it’s supposed to look like, and what users can expect. It is time to buy or download a wordpress theme.

Find a stock theme that suits your needs and will have features that your plan requires – everything from design-related factors such as position of design elements, to tweakable color schemes, and even technical factors such as browser compatibility, and support options should be taken into account.

If within your budget, you may even want to hire someone to create a custom theme according to your specifications. That way, you can be sure that everything about the theme is suited to your specific needs.

Populate the Content on Your Site

Creating the perfect home page does not end when the theme is installed and the site has gone live. You also have to ensure that it has a glut of content that will keep people engage, which means it is now time to populate it with content.

Whether you’re adding multimedia or text content to the site, it is imperative to keep the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) design principle in mind –  make sure the content is scannable and easy to consume; text should be written in small chunks of paragraph as opposed to a huge wall of text, images should be arranged neatly with its full version easily accessible with a click, and so on.

With all of the above in place, it is time to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors. Log out of the wordpress dashboard (or any CMS you are using) and browse your site so you can see what the users will see upon visiting your home page. In this step, you get to see if you’ve missed something or committed a mistake that makes your readers frustrated. In which case you need to go back and make changes. Otherwise, congratulations are in order and it is time to launch your beautiful homepage.

How BuildaTeam.io Can Help

Our company can provide you with top-notch web design and development services. Our teams are experts in their field and they are backed up by a U.S.-Managed Company. We can also provide you with project managers to manage the entire project for you. If you want to avail of our services, simply send us an email at hello@buildateam.io or visit our services pages here.