The Challenge

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Homepage’s content

Published by Esteban Glas on January 25th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Web, Web Marketing

Friend and colleague Jim, asks What goes on the homepage? I’ll try to give my point of view on the issue as smartly as I can, which actually means this will probably be a dumb post
Homepage content depends, of course, on what your site’s aim is. There’s no generic rule-of-thumb for a successful homepage that can apply to every single site out there. Google’s homepage, for instance can be regarded as highly effective, since it’s main, most visible and almost only content is what made google what it is: a text input for a Web Search. Plain brilliant. I really think this minimalistic approach has paid off for google; Yahoo, in contrast is a very popular portal, but not as popular as a search engine. That might well be because it’s almost hard to find the search field amongst all that content. I’m not saying this is wrong, but the aim is different; yahoo’s interest resides in all that additional content.

For my reader’s sake I’ll stick to analyze homepage of sites that do specialized sales (or niche). Some general principles can be applied to this “kind” of sites.

The main Aim should be to generate desire and expectation. This can be achieved in a number of ways, you can have excellent prices or promotions, you can have state-of-the-art products or product previews (which people really love), you can have a combination things. This can only be achieved through one thing: excellent design. You can have the best product, price or combo, but if you don’t catch the user’s eye (remember we’re talking homepage here) and generate interest you are lost.

Homepages should have links to the main areas of interest or the main areas that drive traffic to a site. That being said I consider that main pages should be as clean as possible. Toss in too much content and people wont find the link they are after. You should really know where your focus must be, and aim to that. Don’t distract customers with too much, but give them simple categories they can follow and understand. For example “SMB offers”, “Home office and home offers”, “Large enterprise offers”, “Special offers”, “Winter Offers” can all be grouped into a unique “Offers” link which lands in a pretty page describing and linking to all of the above. Another solution can be graphic queues like rollover menus or similar design / graphic solutions. The old “Less is more” principle applies.

The homepage can be regarded as the an online showcase. When you go to malls, and look at clothing stores you’ll notice that they don’t just toss every single peace of cloth they have, but rather select a couple of offers or their best products. They invite you to see more, since you need to get in to purchase.

The same principle can be applied to sites: you want to hook people and get them to take a deep dive into your site. You wont hook them by putting everything you’ve got out there, but rather by exposing content that will make them click. In order to do this you need to really know your audience, but that’s a whole different story.

Summary.
Home pages should not have too much content (just main, generic, categories), highly stylized and well thought design and must invite users to click through.

Now, whats your point of view, Jim?

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