On Homepages
I just read an interesting article tonight titled Are Homepages Dead Or Are We Missing The Boat? over at Drawar, which looks like a nice site I might add. I find it funny because I’ve had to talk through how to design a website over the past few months to a couple friends and the point the article makes was the exact way I explained to them what a good homepage design should be.
A homepage should summarize any information that will make the user stay on the site. Using my website as an example, there are two distinct sections of my site that I want people to see. My portfolio and this blog. I also wouldn’t mind more twitter followers so that is the third column but besides that, those two sections are what people are going to be coming to my site for, to see my work or read what I have to say (thanks for reading this by the way.) While I am particularly proud of my about page, I’d have to be pretty popular for people to come to my site and want to know more about me before seeing anything I’m spitting out.
To relate it to print design, a homepage is not the front cover. On the internet, no one has time or cares about the front cover (that’s why you always hit skip on flash animations). It’s about getting in, finding the content you want to see and leaving. The homepage is the table of contents.
If I get linked to a page on a website, and I liked it, I want to be able to hit the home button, figure out what the site is about, quickly decide if I’m interested in it and move on. I don’t want the homepage to be paragraphs of some silly marketing jargon or some long-winded grandiose bio. That doesn’t tell me anything about the website. I want to see what content this website will provide me.
Of course I’m sure there are successful exceptions to this rule. Not everyone has dynamic content flying in all the time (or at all) that they can just feed into the homepage. Not everyone has a blog (although they probably have a Facebook or a Twitter account, which serves the same function.) Some websites are meant for wordy intro paragraphs that don’t really tell me anything, but I guarantee I’m not on those websites for very long.