Professional speaker websites are evolving. Meeting planners, event planners and speakers bureau managers have been telling me for months of planning my new MotivationalSpeakersWorldwide.com speaker directory website that they can tell in under five seconds exactly how much a speaker charges and how established the speaker is in the speaking business. And, established professionals speakers are changing their websites to accommodate. Your website absolutely MUST conform to what these people are looking for if you are going to compete!

Although we’ve been designing speaker websites for several years now, it’s important for us to stay hip to what other speakers are doing to promote themselves online. As a result, I’ve been analyzing speaker websites for the past several weeks (at least 500) so that I can more clearly advise our HereNextYear speaker clients.

Many speakers that come our way are not used to looking at other speaker websites. By displaying some good examples here, they and you will be able to give us (or another designer) a more clear direction for your project.

You’ll find there are a variety of looks and feels with the following examples, but one thing is the common denominator and that is the presence of a home page layout that is separate from all the other sub-pages. In fact, with the more established speakers, there are typically “3″ layouts for every website; a home page, a sub-page them used on all other pages, and a blog section.

I’ll blog about what should be included in the sub-pages and blog section another time. For today, I’d like to focus on the home page. It turns out that almost every established, working, busy professional speaker has a home page that uses one of five layouts. Here they are:

Layout #1 - This is by far the most popular featuring a full height or 3/4 height image of the speaker on the left and then content on the right. The content can consist of text, images, a mixture of both, video, books. There are all sorts of variety of what makes up the content section.  Then you will commonly see a search box at the top and 3, 4, or 5 image or video boxes on the bottom.

Here are a list of speaker websites using design layout #1. You will probably recognize most of them:

http://www.drwaynedyer.com
http://www.louisehay.com
http://deepakchopra.com
http://www.marksanborn.com
http://www.myss.com
http://www.ziglar.com
http://fripp.com
https://www.stephencovey.com
http://www.briantracy.com
http://www.laurastack.com
http://www.louheckler.com

Layout #2 – This is the second most popular design layout probably because the speaker or designer feels it’s more important to feature the content first instead of the photo of the speaker. But the other pieces remain pretty much a standard.

Professional speaker websites featuring layout #2:

http://www.jackcanfield.com
http://www.suzeorman.com
http://www.harveker.com (variation of design 2 but with large top header)
http://www.marianne.com
http://www.armandmorin.com
http://www.trump.com
http://www.funnyscott.com

Layout #3 – This design layout is third on the list in popularity, probably because it most closely resembles what people are most used to seeing in websites; 3 columns. You have to be careful with this one, though, because a 3-column layout gets the most comments for being called “too busy” when we do live hot seats in workshops. A hot seat is where you bring someone’s website up on screen for the audience to critique. 3-column websites can be the best format especially if you have product to promote and a list to opt-in to. I’m just saying you have to be careful to not overdo when using a 3-column layout.

Professional speaker websites featuring layout #3:

http://www.peacefulwarrior.com
http://floydwickman.com
http://www.woz.com (Steve Wozniak)
http://www.tedturner.com

Layout #4 – This format combines two scenarios. Sometimes I’m seeing the main video on the right and a figure in the middle of the header and some are without a photo in the header but still with video. If a speaker does not have a main video, this format is hardly ever used. If a speaker does have a main video, I see this format to be growing in popularity maybe more than any of the other designs.

Professional speaker websites featuring layout #4:

http://www.lesbrown.com
http://www.tonyrobbins.com

Layout #5 – This layout is used the least frequently out of the five. My eye tells me the reasoning is because I’m probably not going to read the content to the right if I’m watching a video. So, I would need to get creative with the right column to attract attention there…but not to the extent where people avoid the video.

Professional speaker websites featuring layout #5:

http://wealthfoundation.com (Loral Langemeier)
http://www.michaelegerbercompanies.com (sort of a combination of 5 and 2)

To summarize this Post – I’m sure you can see that there is quite a decision to be made with your speaker website home page! The key to choosing will be looking at many different websites and selecting a layout as well as plan for contents that matches your speaker message and your personality.

I would love to hear your comments and discussion on this topic. Do you like home pages on speaker sites to appear differently than the sub-pages and blog section? What turns you away from speaker websites when you land on them? What makes you stay? Are there any other speaker website layouts you’ve discovered that you would like to share here?