Back to School: Ensuring a Happy, Healthy, Homepage

Back to school is an exciting and busy time for most of us. It is where we reorganize ourselves to ensure a fresh start for the upcoming school year. For students, that may look more like organizing school supplies and timetables, and for staff and faculty, that looks more like organizing sites. If you lack the time to reorganize your whole site, don’t panic! Your site will look all fresh and new with just a simple homepage spruce-up!

1. Quicklinks Makeover

Quick Links are one of the prime features of your homepage. They add an extensive visual element to your page, which helps make your site appealing. Additionally, they drive traffic to other sections of your site and help your audience reach key pages.

Quick Links should:

• Link to your top-viewed pages and/or pages where you want traffic directed. You can view your site’s top-viewed pages through your Google Analytics. This is all covered in our post on Page Visits in Google Analytics.
• Include excerpts which are short descriptions of the page it links to.
• Include engaging, eye-catchy images.

For more information on Quick Links, you can visit our What to put in your Quicklinks post.

2. Modernizing Images and Videos

Images are everything. They set the tone of your site, especially the ones on your homepage. Therefore, it is crucial that the images you choose are attractive, and represent your current audience. By this phrase, we mean selecting high-quality images, as well as updating your images and videos every so often that reflect your site in today’s world.

3. Calls to Action are Your Friend

Calls to action (CTA), are anything you include on your site that encourages a person to take a certain action. CTA is important because your audience is directly engaging with your site. Popular calls to action include the “register” button for an event or a “subscribe” button to a newsletter. CTA can be added to your page as a button, a Quick Link, or as linked text. For more information on CTA, visit our Calls to Action post.

4. Keeping up with Current Events

Keep your homepage up-to-date by promoting upcoming events and recent news with News and Events Listings. This will help ensure your site’s content is fresh and lively and has the appeal that your site is being regularly monitored and cared for. Additionally, it also keeps the community excited and regularly informed about what is going on in your department.

5. Steering your Site in the Right Direction

Lastly, you want to make sure your homepage is in line with Carleton’s image and the University’s current brand guidelines. This includes elements such as the brand, visual identity, typography, colours, photography and graphic elements. Reflecting these elements on your homepage helps create a consistent user-experience across the Carleton domain. For more information visit Carleton Master Brand Guide.

Still interested in learning more about homepages? Visit our post on How to Make your Homepage Visually Appealing.