Your Front Door

Make your first impression count!
In designing your website, the most important impression you need to make is your first one. To be more specific, you must make this good impression in the top 400 or so pixels of your page. Your goal as webmaster is to make the person that came across your site want to stay and see more.

Real Estate agents have known a little secret for a long time. The most important part of any home being shown is the front door. No matter how beautiful or how great the price, people form an opinion at the front door. Since you typically cannot just barge into the house, you have to spend a little time there waiting for the owner to come to the door. There is not much else to look at...

What has been proven, is that homes with a warm, clean, welcoming front door sell the fastest. Not only that, but they tend to sell for more.

What's the point to this?
There is a point to this analogy. The top part of your main page is Your Front Door. It is the first thing people see when they come to your site, and they have to look at it while your page's contents download to their browser. This is the exact situation that you have with our home for sale.

For your pondering pleasure...
Ask yourself the following questions before choosing your background image for your main page:

• If this were a shirt, would I wear it on a job interview?

• Other than my lava lamp, is there anything I own that resembles this?

• If I went to visit somebody I had never met and their front door looked like this, would I knock, or would I run away?

• Can I stare at this for sixty seconds, and still hold my last meal down?

• Is this the image I want to project to the world?

• Does this image serve a purpose, either demonstrating something or aesthetic?

• Is there a suitable font color to use in order that people can read the text?

• If it is a 16.7 million color JPG image, how will it look when displayed at only 256 color resolution?

• If I am using other graphics, especially transparent GIF files, how will they coordinate and appear against this background?

There are some effective uses for these types of images. You might have some type of Splash Screen with large, bold writing expressing a thought for which the image supports the mood of your message.

Another device you might try is to use your background image as a border for your page with this little trick. After viewing this page, please use your back button to return to this page. This will work with most popular browsers, but try and be mindful of your text color for everyone else.

The idea is to do something a little different to spice up your page, not drown it in sauce. Experiment a little and be imaginative.

Let them know they are in the right place.
Now that we have the virtual equivalent of a bad hair day out of the way, let's talk about your message.

As mentioned earlier, we are working with a critical area about 400 pixels tall. This is not much space so we had better be sure to use it to our best advantage. Maybe we can think of this as our welcome mat. You might be asking yourself the following question:

If this guy knows what he's talking about, what on Earth is that bird doing on his welcome mat?