I have been working very hard on planning out my new website, but I have some issues. My website is about animation, and it is almost 99% ready to put on the net. However, my main focus is tutorials about animation. I will also be showcasing my own animations on the site. But I just can't figure out what to put on the main page. I don't want to put my animations there, and I don't want the tutorials to be there, but I have nothing else. What should a home page offer? I thought about writing up some long thing about the site, but no one wants to read that. I thought about having a blog up there, but I could never figure out how to use wordpress, and that was why my last site went down (I got wordpress and messed around with it so much that I ended out ruining everything, and I just didn't have the gumption to fix it back up).

How about an "enter" page. Have a small animation up and underneath put up the enter link.

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You are thinking about what people don't want to see. That's good. The content you mentioned may be useful on the site but not on the opening page.

Now reverse your thinking and ask yourself, "What are people looking for?" What search term did they use to get there? When my page opens what do they need to see to convince them they came to the place they want to be?

They don't need to be pushed right into an animation or tutorial because you don't know what kind they are looking for, but they came to your site looking for something specific and they need to see prominently displayed something that tells them they will find it on your site.

As has been pointed out in many comments on this site, people may only be on your page two or three seconds if they don't see something to tell them they want to be there. So you are right to recognize how important this page is.

Without taking time to develop anything original (you can do that for yourself), you need a title that clearly identifies the site content. It could be as simple as "Animation Tutorials." I can easily see three or four paragraphs to describe your content with navigation listing tutorials, etc. on the side.

First paragraph: "If you are looking for tutorials to help you make your own animations for a website you are at the right place. ...

Second paragraph: "Helpful tutorials you will find here include...[use list format and include names with brief descriptions of the tutorials you offer]"

Third paragraph: "In addition to the tutorials, I enjoy posting some of my own animations and some contributed by viewers like you......[another list"

Just a few thoughts.

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Good Success!
James
Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

I would recommend installing a blog.

Your blog will draw visitors from a variety of sources and also it is very easy to update/write new posts.

You can channel these visitors to your tutorials. If you use wordpress, you can create pages very easily. And you will also have many other benefits like template based design (if you install adsense once, it shows up on all pages), additional plugins, etc and most important of all SEO benefits.

Wordpress is very easy to use. There is nothing complicated. I love wordpress.

In the beginning it may be a bit difficult but you can master it very easily. There are many few tutorials on the Internet about Wordpress and so you shouldn't have any problems.

If you mess up with the files in Wordpress, all you have to do is perform a clean install and import the database. It is that simple.

I would recommend using Wordpress, but there are also simple content management system you can consider.

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The time, at last, has come to visit you, and I am here.

Okay, I see you have a niche for anime. To decide what to put on the main page, act as if you were a visitor to the website. Ask youself the following.

What do I want to see?
What do I want to be able to do?
Do others like the feel of this?
Is it colorful?
Is it inviting?

There are plenty more, but just think in general how others are viewing it.

Thanks guys.
2young2start, it's not anime (I hate anime), but good old fashion animation. I guess you're right, though, I do need to look at it at a viewers perspective. I'm thinking that a blog is a good idea, but I need to figure out wordpress. Last time, I couldn't design it to fit with my site, and since I never had the time or gumption to learn how to code and design my own templates, I never was able to finish my site. I still don't think I can do a blog, I just can't get my brain to learn that right now. I don't have much time as it is.

How about putting al little animated gif file in a entry page.


Like a plane with the letters welcome on < your site > that will fly by.

and under that a nice button like Enter The Animated World or such. not things like. Enter Page or Go Inside. People who come to your site come there to amuse themselfs or to learn something how to do that stuff so make it attractive with an example of your work, so they become curious and gonna look for more.