One of the toughest obstacles in making a website stand out is creating an interesting home page or blog. You can have the best content on the web, but if the first page a person sees is drab or a garbled mess, they’re going to leave, probably never to return again.

It doesn’t matter if you blog about the best care for your goldfish or trying to craft the perfect family vacation, you need the first thing a visitor sees has instant impact and want them to click through the rest of the site.

So the first thing you must realize is that you must bring out the big guns. Your best feature is often the most eye-catching. If you’re trying to attract people traveling to Florida, you have the most popular Disney attractions front and center. Couple your words with bold images and the winning combination is a good first step to holding a person’s attention.

The main attraction may be the hook – but you must offer more content if you want to reel your audience in. You want to stay current and you want to be interesting. Popular attractions, current news and even something as simple as the weather – as long as you stay on topic and keep things easy-to-read, people will be more apt to continue through the rest of your site.

Links are important as well, but only if utilized correctly. You can experiment with fonts, shapes, even sounds in the right context – but if you go too far, sensory overload will turn people off. This goes along with graphics too. It may seem obvious, but clashing colors, random text, missing pictures (the dreaded red X) and dead links spell certain doom if they’re not addressed.

Finally, you must have something unique. Make no mistake, if you have a website, I can pretty much guarantee someone else has had the exact same idea. So you must decide what’s going to set you apart from the pack – and it doesn’t have to be just one thing – the more innovative you are, the better chance you have at driving traffic up.

Tailor specific features for your site, but things such as articles written by the staff, a calendar of events filtered specifically for site with the ability for user-generated content or special offers unique to a site will all help drive traffic. Offer something helpful, interesting and useful and you will find people more inclined to visit often, and recommend it to others.

So whether starting a new site or updating an existing one, remember that you only have one chance to make a good first impression. With the right blend of design, usability, content and unique feature you too may find success is just a click away.