The Foyer
November 30, 1998
Okay, we've finally made it to the home page. A well-designed home
page has the following characteristics:
- It provides an overview of what is available on the site,
and every section of the site can be reached from the home page,
either directly or with no more than 2 or 3 clicks.
- It looks attractive and projects the right image for the company,
but it still loads in a reasonably short amount of time. A balance
must be reached between whizzy graphics and fast page loading.
- It reinforces the branding of the company or product, so visitors
instantly know what site they have landed on.
- It shares certain elements with all the other pages of the
site, so that the pages all fit together, and visitors get a sense
of the pages belonging to one site, rather than being a bunch of
unrelated pages.
- A home page usually includes a small amount of content, even
if only a brief description of the company, but its main purpose
is as a list of links to other pages where the real content resides.
A home page is much like the table of contents in a book or magazine.
Most business home pages will have the following links:
- About the Company
- Our Products and Services
- How to Contact Us
Any site that also sells products online should have another:
Order Here! The fewer clicks required to get to your ordering page,
the more orders you'll get - it's a statistical fact. Put your
ordering page one click away from the home page (and perhaps
from every other page as well). Actually, it's probably better
to call the link "How to Order" or some such, and make it clear
to the user that they have not committed themselves to ordering
anything until the credit card number is submitted. A certain
well-known (and well-designed) site offers the following
no-pressure button:
"Add to Shopping Cart (You can always remove it later.)"
Most sites, of course, will have more than the above-mentioned
four navigational items on their home page. What you have there
depends on the purpose of your site. Whatever's important,
whatever you want people to see, should be right there, not
buried several levels down.
Resist the temptation to give your navigational titles clever
but ambiguous names. Of course you don't have to stick to the
plain vanilla examples above.
- Who We Are
- What We Do
- Where to Find Us
Is also perfectly alright, but I wouldn't go much farther
out than that. Again, the purpose of your site is to provide
information, not to entertain with word games. A certain other
(less well-designed) site belonged to a company that sold
computers, but used cows as a theme. Their home page
(at one time) sported two choices like these:
What the heck's the difference, and why would I want to
click on either one? Do your users a favor and make it clear
what they'll get when they click on a link. If your site features
downloadable files, audio or video links, or other bandwidth
hogs, list the file size next to each link so users will know
what they're getting into. Inform.
The Front Porch
Nav 101
Pyramid Scheme
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