There are three main ineffective features that are often used on homepages which are not helpful to the end user. These features, including homepage sliders, tabbed sections, and news feeds, may seem helpful at first, but a deeper study shows how damaging they can be to the website.
1. The homepage slider, also known as a rotating banner or carousel, is seldom clicked on except for the first position. The idea is to rotate through content instead of selecting the content that is most important, which is a bad idea. Viewers are not going to watch until the banner rotates through its various messages. Instead, the current idea is to use large “hero” areas with responsive design and personalized content. The “hero” image is one of the first visual images that a person sees on the web page and is important to provide the site’s most important content. The hero image can be a rotating list of images but it’s important to keep a consistent message, look, and feel.
2. The tabbed sections are useless because most people click only on the first position, meaning they did not bother with the hidden content. Instead, people tend to scroll. So, put all of the relevant content down the page. People are visual and in a hurry. They quickly scroll down and look for images to save time.
3. News Feeds are typically visited infrequently, probably due to lack of images. Again, people are visual. Display your most popular content in visual form to grab the user’s attention immediately, otherwise they may just go look elsewhere.
What do all of these bad features have in common? Images! People want images, not text. Increase interaction on your homepage by providing content-based images. Engage the user in a grid of images, content sections with images and do it in a stunning, visual way. Doing this will help engage the user and make them want to interact with your website more.
Source: kunocreative.com