Home Page
The home page is the most important page of your website. It is usually the page where most of your visitors will see when they first visit your website. Therefore, your home page should be able to tell your visitors what your website is about within the first 5 seconds. If not, visitors may leave your site and visit other sites. As it is so important, it should deserve the most attention than any other page of your website.

The home page should have all the features that are normally found on it. One of the most important features is the navigation bar. You may find it easy to navigate through your website but this may not be the case for first-time visitors. Therefore, the navigation bar should be visible and clear to use. Name your navigation normally to prevent confusion.

Next, it should communicate quickly and efficiently to visitors what the website is about. First impression is very important. If it cannot capture the visitor's interest, they will leave your site immediately.When you are designing your home page, make sure that all important and major points are above the fold. This means that all important information and graphics should be visible to visitors without them having to scroll down the page. When you place all important information above the fold, you will prevent users concluding your site is not of their interest.

Another interesting point you should take note is that many visitors access the quality of the site based on the home page. If they feel you have a bad home page, they will conclude that your site is of poor quality, even if your content or products are good. So this makes it very important for you to spend more time to design it.

When visitors land on your home page, they will usually look at the top center of the page first, followed by looking from the left to the right. So, you should place all the important points towards the top and center of the page. In order to do this, you must plan the layout of the page properly and place items based on their importance.

Last but not least, pay attention to the title of your home page that is shown at the top left hand corner of your browser. You should not just place your company name in the title. Add in some descriptive information about your company so that visitors will have a better idea on what your business is offering.

Images
Every where on the web you will see people telling you to keep images or pictures to the minimum. The reason for this is that they take a long time to load and visitors might not wait around on your page to see the images, or more importantly, your content.

Here are a few tips to make your images load faster.
1. Reduce your images quality to 70%. This will have almost no effect on the naked eye but will reduce the size of the image.
2. Save all your images as JPEG files if it has a lot of colour or PING if it has less than 5 colors.
3. Use height and width attributes for your image. This will tell the browser how much space to keep for the image and wont hold up the rest of your content while the image is loading.
4. If you are using a lot of images, use a pre-loader program to keep your visitor happy while he waits for your images to load.
5. Add a few images on the previous page with 1x1 height and width attributes. This will load the image into the cache of the user which will then just open the image on the actual page.