The Home Page - Page 3

The home page is the flagship of the site and should therefore be designed differently from the remaining pages. Of course, home pages and interior pages should share the same style, but there are differences. For example, the home page should not have a Home button, because it is very annoying to click on a button that links right back to the current page. Also, the home page should typically have a larger logo and a more prominent placement of the company name or site name. The first immediate goal of any home page is to answer the questions "Where am I?" and "What does this site do?"-both of which require a straightforward and large version of the name. The answers should not be in the form of the dreaded mission statements sometimes seen on overly bureaucratic sites. Rather, it should be obvious from the design what purpose the site would serve for a first- time user.

For the first-time visitor, answering the question "What does this site do?" may be the most important function of the home page, but for most other users, the most important function of a home page is to serve as the entry point to the site's navigation scheme. Often, this will take the form of a list of the top levels of a hierarchical directory, but depending on the information architecture, different forms of top-level entry aides may make sense.

What does this company do? Simplicity is good, but a home page needs some info.

The first impression from this home page is that this might be a place to buy coffee or get free software when, in fact, it's a place to buy batteries. But there is not a single picture of a battery on the home page, nor is the word highlighted anywhere. The site name is nice and prominent and does imply a battery- oriented site, so the design is not a total loss. Also, the navigation categories are easy to find and fairly logical. But why waste space on a colored stripe across the top with today's date? For a sporadically updated site, there might be some benefits from a footer that mentions the date of the latest update, but the current date will never be used by anybody.

For example, people visiting a travel site will often want to make an airline reservation, so a way to enter the departure and arrival cities for a trip can often be a good top-level entry point into such a site.

The home page is also the place to feature any news or special promotions you want to bring to the attention of all visitors. But remember that most people come to your site in order to accomplish something specific. Only rarely are they interested in simply checking out what might be happening in your company or what products you feel like putting on sale. Therefore, the news area should be relatively restrained and leave a large part of the page available for navigation-the exception to this rule obviously being sites that focus on news. For such sites, the user's goal in visiting will often be to "see what's up" without having any specific stories in mind in advance. Even for news sites, it is still important to remember that some users will visit in order to research specific stories or current events and that people will also often want to find old articles that have long ago been pushed off the home page. Navigation remains a priority in any case.

Most home pages need a prominent search feature because many users are search-dominant and don't want to bother navigating to their destination link-by-link. For sites where search is a primary access mechanism, it makes sense to include an actual search box right on top of the home page. For other sites, a simple (but still prominent) link to the search page may suffice.

In summary, a home page should offer three features: a directory of the site's main content areas (navigation), a summary of the most important news or promotions, and a search feature. If done well, directory and news will help answer the first-time user's need to find out what the site is about in the first place. Even so, always look at the home page with an eye to asking, "What can this site do for me?" And remember the name and logo.

Site Design - Page 2
Designing Web Usability
The Home Page: Further Examples - Page 4