Your homepage serves as the portal to the different areas of your website. Be mindful that navigation facilitation is only a secondary purpose of home inspector’s homepage. The primary purpose is to sell your services.
Home vs. Homepage
Consider not using the term “home” to refer to your homepage. Instead, reserve “homepage” for your website's homepage.
Welcome
The word “Welcome” is universally used as a signpost for homepages. This signpost will help ensure that visitors recognize their starting point, should they return to your homepage after exploring other pages of your website.
Don’t be compelled to offer a lengthy welcome message or happy talk that eats up prime homepage space. The simple and lone word “Welcome” at the start of your homepage text is plenty.
Navigation
The following list includes the links that your website could have. It's ultimately up to you and how you think your website should be structured.
Contact Me Now
The whole purpose of your website is to get your phone to ring, so if you have both an email address and you answer your phone regularly, you might want to also turn “Contact Me” into a category titled “Contact Me Now” and put the actual contact information under it. Also, if you're willing to answer your phone in the evening, say so in parentheses after your phone number. This removes a visitor’s hesitation to call you in the evening.
Phone Number
A significant percentage of visitors (mostly real estate agents) visit a home inspector's website for the sole purpose of looking up a familiar inspector's contact information. Some real estate agents who regularly used my home inspection services for years never commit to memory their favorite inspector's phone number and always have to go back online to retrieve it. Therefore, repeating your contact information on every page of your website seems reasonable.
Sample Report
If you can offer a sample report online that is downloadable, put it as link at the bottom of the “Full Home Inspections” page, as well as a sub-line underneath it.
Capitalization
You might like each word of the categories to be capitalized and sub-categories to be all lower-case, as this helps make clear the distinction between their relative importance. All uppercase words are difficult to read. However, if you are an inspector who has many qualifications, you might want to capitalize every letter in your “MY QUALIFICATIONS” link and/or make it bold font so as to draw attention, and more clicks to it.
Full Home Inspections
Your "Full Home Inspections" link should take your visitor to a page that describes what you inspect. It's really a subset of InterNACHI’s Standards of Practice and could include something like this:
Our Full Inspections include:
• roof, vents, flashings and trim;
• gutters and downspouts;
• skylight, chimney, and other roof penetrations;
• decks, stoops, porches, walkways and railings;
• eaves, soffits and fascia;
• grading and drainage;
• basement, foundation and crawlspace;
• water penetration and foundation movement;
• heating system;
• cooling system;
• main water shut-off valve;
• water heating system;
• interior plumbing fixtures and faucets;
• drainage sump pumps with accessible floats;
• electrical service line and meter box;
• main disconnect and service amperage;
• electrical panel(s), breakers and fuses;
• grounding and bonding;
• GFCIs and AFCIs;
• fireplace damper door and hearth;
• insulation and ventilation;
• garage doors, safety sensors and openers;
• and much more.
Note: There are sound legal reasons to include a live link to InterNACHI’s Standards of Practice at the bottom of this list.
Each of your links under "Additional Inspections" should take the visitor to a page that offers information about that issue, a short description of how you inspect that issue, and the additional fee you charge for that inspection (so that no one accidentally assumes that it's included in your full/standard home inspection).
