Don't Fight over your Homepage

— Published February 28th, 2006  |  by Laurence Veale

It’s understandable, as the homepage is the most coveted piece of real estate on your site. So how do you keep everyone happy? It can definitely be an exercise in compromise, but here we offer some suggestions.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

The importance of the homepage can apparently be backed up with statistics. The page often has more page accesses than any other part of the site and so therefore seems to require the most effort.

But a more important statistic is how much time your visitors actually spend there. This is where a good analytics strategy is really important. Not only do you need the raw numbers, but you need to know how to analyse them to work out what’s really important.

On our site, most visitors spend much more time on some select pages. The average time spent on the page of our recent article on Web2.0 Mashups was about four minutes, whereas on the homepage it was about one minute.

Is the homepage important?

This ties in with some recent articles that argue the homepage is much less important than the content pages deeper in the site, because they are the pages that visitors are most interested in. Search is so dominant now that you can’t assume that the homepage is the starting point on your site. Through a search engine results page, a visitor can teleport onto any page on your site and it’s probably very close to what they were looking for.

So what should the homepage be?

The homepage may be decreasing in terms of importance, but we still see it as vital in the overall structure. While it may no longer be the starting point it was intended to be, it could well be the next destination after landing deep into the site from a search engine.

Why?

Visitors have multiple goals, some of which we can never hope to anticipate. We need to offer visitors an overall view of the site and the organisation so they can have a good mental map in their mind of where everything fits, regardless of what goals they may have.

So how can you serve multiple goals in such a limited amount of space and keep everyone happy? You can’t. What you can do is to clearly prioritise and emphasise the most important visitor goals. Then to serve more general goals, you could provide a good site search that delivers accurate results or a well-designed breadcumb navigation scheme that gives visitors a picture of where they are in the depth of the site.

What should the homepage actually do?

• Define the organisation in one sentence
• Send visitors on their way: funnel visitors towards their goals.
• Show the latest: whether it’s news, publications or even jobs.

Where can I read more?

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir

Home Page Goals, Derek Powazek
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability, Jakob Nielsen
Is home page design even relevant anymore?