When I set out to design a website, I do it backwards. I start with the design of the smallest, deepest element: the story page or search results. Then I work backwards to design their containers: section pages, indexes. Then, lastly, I work on the home page.
I do this because each container needs to adequately set expectations for what it contains. If the home page says one thing, but the internal pages say another, that’s going to lead to a user-experience failure.
This also means that, by the time work begins on the home page, there’s a lot of momentum going already. And any lingering anxiety is going to come to a head—on the home page.
Home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals.
Before I get into those goals, here’s a grain of salt. Every site I’ve ever worked on has had strikingly similar traffic trends, and one stands out. Remember that smallest, deepest element I described earlier? This is the atomic element—for a news site, it’s the story page; for a search engine, it’s the search result; for a store, it’s a product page. This page accounts for 60 to 75 percent of all page views on the site. The rest belong to the home page.
This is not to say that the home page is unimportant—it’s hugely important as a first impression. But looking at the numbers, you’ll get far more bang out of tweaks to the atomic element pages than the home page.
That said, let’s look at the unique challenges that home pages present. Remember, when I say home page, I mean the page that lives at whatever.com. The first page a user sees when they show up at your front door.
Any home page has four main goals, in this order:
- Answer the question, “What is this place?”
- Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way
- Show what’s new
- Provide consistent, reliable global navigation
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