How to write a sucessful homepage content

A homepage is your storefront to your potential customers. It is your personal greeting and opportunity to connect with people you have never met before. Your message must be able to grab their attention and makes them want to learn more. Do not try to convince your audiences unless you were allowed.

Followings are a few tips to streamline your message and creating a welcoming message to get your customers to the front door.

Audience orientation

Good home page content must focus on customer’s need and what you can offer. It shouldn't be all about you. Customers don’t want know you yet. They just want to know what they want and what you can offer. Be honest! Take a look at your homepage from customers’ point of view. And make sure you can answer all of these questions.

is there anything for me?
What is your offer that makes my life better?
How can I participate?
Be focused

You only have 3 seconds to grab your audiences’ attention and make them want to learn more. As a result, your content must get to the point from the beginning. Don’t try to tell them your story on your home page. If they want to know you, they will find it on “about us” menu. Just focus on what you can offer. What is your best deal? Bring out the best of you. And most important!!!  Always include a call to action.

No need to proclaim that you are the best in the world.

Simply tell them what you can offer. Imagine you are going to your local store to buy a sandwich. And the owner standing in front of the counter keeps telling you that he is a good person. That he is the best in the world…. How do you feel? You only want to know what kind of sandwich he offers, right? Any Hot deals? That’s it!

Use simple English and make it easy to read…  Audiences don’t want to read business Jargon. Content with lots of keywords and Jargons isn’t going to make people want to do business with you. It’s not only obvious, but boring to death too.

Engagement

Try to engage you audiences by pulling them to the other part of your website. Highlight special offers, your new products, blogs, videos, customer’s reviews, tips and advice… and keep in mind, a homepage is important, but your entire website’s pages must work together to make them want to come back again and again. People come to your website to get to know you and find what you can do for them. Your content must be clear and easy to read while engaging them to open the front door.

Tell me how your homepage content is. Any good example you want to share with us? I would like to learn from your experience, what is working for you?

What is the Differrence between EAL and ESL

In a profession littered with acronyms, it’s often difficult to know whether you’re teaching EFL, ESL, EAL, ESOL, or something else! So what exactly is the difference between ESL and EFL and EAL?

Well, as you probably already know ESL stands for English as a Second Language and EFL stands for English as a Foreign Language. Although you are still either learning or teaching English, these two acronyms have a slightly different meaning.

ESL, EFL, ESOL, EAL?

EFL is taught in countries where the native language is not English. For example, if you are learning English in Thailand the local language is Thai and you’d therefore be studying English as a Foreign Language. In most cases, students learning EFL in Thailand will often be in a class with other students that all speak Thai as their first language. Therefore, when teaching EFL, you will usually be in front of a class that all share the same first language.

ESL, on the other hand, is used where English is being taught to students who are from a non-English speaking country, but studying English in an English speaking country. For example, a Japanese person studying English in London. In this instance, it’s far more common to have students that come from different countries and therefore have different languages as their first language.

Although these two terms are similar, you can see that the difference between the two terms is dependent on where you are learning English.

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a universally accepted term that is used around the world, but English as a Second Language requires a little more discussion because it isn’t used by everybody. One criticism of the term ESL is it might not be a second language for somebody, it might be a 3rd, 4th or even a 5th language for some people. Therefore, English as a Second Language probably isn’t the best way to describe the subject.

As a result of this criticism some countries have adopted different ways to describe people learning English in native English speaking countries. The United Kingdom, New Zealand and Ireland now use the term ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ (ESOL), and the expression ‘English as an Additional Language’ (EAL) is becoming increasingly popular in the UK. The United States, Canada and Australia continue to use ESL, but ‘English Language Learner’ (ELL) is now more widely used to describe a student learning ESL

Unfortunately, there is no umbrella term that can be used to cover all of these different terms. Although, ESL is widely understood it is probably the term that most people would use. TESOL on the other hand is becoming more universally accepted around the world and is most likely to become the universal term for this area of study.

I've used ESL in as the title for this blog as it’s the term that most people recognize, but I prefer the term EAL because it doesn't assume that English is the second language of the student, instead it implies that somebody is learning English as an additional language, whether that be their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or whatever number it might be for the student.