Not everyone can afford to get a professional web designer/developer to put their sites on the net.  And if you’re thinking of offering some service or product from the home or have a fledgling small business starting out an e-commerce site, chances are you’d either be making your own website or getting a college student do one for you. 

That’s just fine; there are many software tools that let amateurs generate websites and there are templates online that you can download for free.  Just make sure your site gets noticed and once noticed, that you won’t turn away visitors.  SEO methods will do the work to get your site noticed.  But you could lose your visitors if your web design is not good enough. 

That means putting only what matters and what catches the attention on the first page.  Use relevant images and graphics to spice up your page, but sparingly so that it loads fast. Nobody wants to wait for your site to load.  And nobody wants to scroll through a long page to get to what they want. 

So don’t put long articles there, just the title and maybe the first paragraph and the rest in the page devoted to the article with links to the other sections. First impression lasts.  That goes for your homepages as well.