Your website should help you strengthen your brand and attract new customers. A beautiful, professional website is one of the most important things for business owners to invest in today. Luckily, with Site editor, it’s neither expensive nor time-consuming to make an amazing website.

Let’s examine the two main things your website should do, and how to achieve them.

Step 1: Capture Attention with a Beautiful Home page

The home page is the first thing that potential customers will see when they visit your website. People will judge within the first few seconds of seeing your website whether they want to stay and learn more or leave and visit a different site. So it’s crucial to make it look good.

Mouthwatering images of fruit make this an excellent home page

So how do you make a great home page? Follow these two rules:

A. Have beautiful homepage images
B. Keep it simple

Let’s start with A—beautiful homepage images. As you can see from the website above, one beautiful image is all you need. On the other hand, if you have a blurry, unprofessional or unattractive homepage image, it’ll certainly ruin your site. When in doubt, hire a professional photographer!

Now, part B is the next most important thing: keep it simple. Don’t put too much text. Don’t have too many links. Just convey your message with a beautiful photo and a few well-chosen words. One sentence is usually enough.

You’ll want to convey what type of business you are, where you’re located, and what makes your business special.

Just one sentence is all you need. In this example, they tell us what they are and how they work. It could be improved by adding their location, but it looks so good that we’ll give them a pass.

Step 2: Inspire Action

Once you’ve caught their attention, now you want them to take action. First, ask yourself what it is you want your website visitors to do. Do you want them to buy products online? Make a reservation? Sign up for your newsletter?

You can embed a widget like this to get people to make reservations directly on your homepage.

Whatever action you want people to take, define it clearly and then pick out the tool that can best help you achieve it. Here’s a table of common actions and tools to help inspire those actions.

Your action doesn’t have to take place on the home page—in fact, it often makes sense to have a page dedicated to the action you want them to take. However, once you decide on what you want your customers to do, don’t clutter your website with irrelevant stuff!

Make it easy for them to find what they’re supposed to find.

If you can accomplish those two things—capture attention and inspire action—your website will be the best business decision you’ve ever made.