There's No Place Like Homepage

In an effort to preach to the choir a bit more (everybody always forgets the choir) I thought I would nit-pick about how people manage the purpose of their homepage. Now, while there is plenty of books on the topic, I thought I would point out a few typical ideas around design and content management as well as push a few pet peeve ideas out there (since this is my blog, I guess I can do that.)

The best way to address this for me will be to outline a number of ideas and then simply address them. So here we go.

“The homepage is the same as a landing page.”
This is wonderful though because it would simplify so much. It is, however, not true. A homepage is a type of landing page in the most simple of senses, but they are not the same. A “homepage” has a one to one relationship to a website. Every site should have a homepage and that homepage targets the users of a single website. A landing page is marketing speak for “the place people go when they arrive at your site in the middle of some campaign to elicit your interest.” The key is that a Homepage needs to target everyone coming to your site and immediately help them get to where they are going. It is like the person who greets you in a store and helps you to the right department. The common mistake here is that people treat the homepage like a department, which it is not. It is the greeter. But understand, it is both a meeter and a greeter. A greeting might only get you to where you are going, while a meeter will make you feel good about heading deeper into the store (through technique, tone, friendliness, helpfulness and approachability.) A landing page has a much tighter focus. It is a campaign focal point that is targeting a sub-demographic of a websites audience. The purpose here is often to create greater differentiation from your competitors and to drive them intuitively into a relationship to the topic of the landing page. The key with a landing page is to narrow the focus to one demographic angle.

“The homepage should be different from the interior content pages.”
This is somewhat true on a couple levels and completely untrue with regard to standards. For example, in terms of design, specifically layout of pages, you want to differentiate from homepage content hooks and real content. On the homepage you should not be hosting content. And by hosting, I mean there should not be content on the homepage that cannot be found anywhere else in an appropriate category (remember, the homepage is not a department.) The content on the homepage is meant to hook people to delve deeper and examine your site content more. They best way to “train” a reader is to create a visual delineation through design and specifically layout of the page. There are so many ways to do this, so rather than describe the world to you I will give a few hints on what not to do: Do not move or change your navigational tools. Navigation falls into a much larger category of standards and once you pick one navigational approach, it is better to leave them where the use can continue to expect them throughout the experience of your website. Do not move the search from the general upper right of your website. If you have included search functionality in your site, be sure it is and it stays in the upper right. The only thing worse than moving these standards is standardizing on your own new ways of doing certain things. It never makes sense to not change to a standard for fear that people will struggle with change. Even your oldest longest visitors are likely used to working with the right standards on sites other than yours. You are simply doing them a favor by updating to standards on your site. Do not switch from a simple narrow centered format on he homepage to a wide format on the interior pages. This rule can be broken but only when it makes sense. It usually does not make sense unless you are hosting content that only works in a very wide windowed format. Do not completely adopt a new color scheme for the interior content pages. You don’t want people to feel like they have left your website and moved on to a new one.

“Portal website homepages are like any other website homepage.”
This is true only in that they are both on the web. Other than that the rules completely change. Well, that is not entirely true but for those of us who are used to working with portal sites you will know that I am only slightly joking. A portal typically has to bring together what would normally seem like a functionally unified group, but who’s true social demographic is completely unreasonably different. This is where a lot of the normal bets are off on a portal. For example, on the homepage you are actually targeting summary types of information dissemination. People visit you because they know what you provide. While subordinate sites might try and target new visitors, the portal typically attempts to sort a huge amount of information. Navigation is the purpose of the portal website, not targeting audience. We are, instead, targeting content.

There is so much to say about good homepage design. Maybe you would like to contribute to this article by adding a comment of your thoughts. I will return from time to time and take the best of the comment and append them to this blog entry with credit to you if you are interested in contributing via comments.