There are websites that make you want to stay and visit for awhile and there are websites that you don’t. We’ve all visited both, but have you thought about why some websites just seem to work better than others?<br /><br />Cookbook sites are a perfect example. When you visit one cookbook site, you find yourself lingering and browsing for more books long after you’ve found the one you want. On another site, you may not even bother looking for your book. Look at the differences for clues about how to design a site that works.<br /><br />There is a cookbook for everything. There are cookbooks for ethnic foods, cookbooks for dieters, cookbooks for meat lovers and cookbooks for vegetarians. There must be thousands of topics to choose from. When someone goes to a website for the first time, they are not going to stay for a long time.<br /><br />A good webmaster knows this. His homepage is going to be light on text. It is going to get to the point within a couple of short paragraphs. He wants the readers to be drawn immediately to the cookbook they’re looking for, so the emphasis on the homepage will be on the index.<br /><br />He will have the books all arranged into easily identifiable categories. Those visitors who are looking for <a href=’http://www.howtodecoratecake.com/cake-decorating-books-for-all-occasions.html’>cake decorating books</a> will intuitively know which category they will find them under. Since cakes are desserts, the general category might have a link button that reads, ‘Delicious Desserts.’ If the reader is looking for Mexican recipes, the homepage category might say ‘Favorites from Around the World’ or something like that.<br /><br />You are not going to stay for long at a website that offers too much, too soon on the homepage. People aren’t going to spend five minutes reading a long story about why yours is the best cookbook site on the web. They’re not going to scroll through a long list of book titles to find one on <a href=’http://www.howtodecoratecake.com/’>how to decorate cake</a>. They want to see at a glance where they want to go and click to the next page. Keep it short and sweet on the homepage.<br /><br />Almost every website with a number of products has a search facility. However, this should not be thought of as a replacement for a well designed homepage. The visitor hasn’t come to a search engine – a search engine has already directed them to the site. If they typed ‘<a href=’http://www.howtodecoratecake.com/cake-decorating-designs-to-complete-your-masterpiece.html’>cake decorating designs</a>’ once in google, they don’t want to do it again on your site. Also, while you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you also want them to notice other books while you’ve got their attention.<br /><br />In a nutshell, there are three elements to a winning homepage. Make an eye-catching, themed design, keep your content to a minimum and make your site easy to navigate.