Article: Home Page Design

By Daniel Szuc


It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This article will help you better understand how to approach home page design.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PAGE - OR IS IT?
Often, both customers and the business itself see the home page as one of the most important pages on the Web site. It’s a place to present key information about products, services, and special offers; contact information; and calls to action—giving customers direct access to what they need quickly. So customers can serve themselves through the home page.For many users, the home page is a place where, if they get lost, they can start their journey again. Users often want to return to a site’s home page to reorient themselves. We often see this happen during usability testing. For a business, the home page offers an opportunity to communicate their value to the world—particularly as it relates to their products and services. Therefore, ideally, a home page should reflect and balance business objectives and user needs.

OTHER LANDING PAGES, TOO?
In his article “Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?” Jared Spool of UIE pointed out that many users are bypassing the home page, going directly to whatever page satisfies their content need. So, it’s important for all your key landing pages to perform a similar role to the home page. According to Spool:

“A growing number of sites… see a lot of traffic that bypasses their site’s home page, going directly to content pages. As a result, these landing pages—the first page on your site the user encounters—have to perform the same functions as your home page, for these users. That turns out to be a lot easier than many designers think, mostly because they usually don’t really understand the true functions of a home page.

“In studying users visiting sites, we learned a long time ago that there are only two important functions for a home page:

The home page delivers the content to [users] that they are seeking—such as the top story on CNN—or
The home page provides strong scent to those pages that contain the content the user seeks.
“Those are the only two things users care about on a home page. (Lots of designers try to make the home page serve other functions, such as [telling] the user about things the organization cares about, but the user doesn’t—such as financial news about the business or what new products are on sale—but users blow right past this content and pay no attention to it. We’ve found it’s all a waste of valuable design resources.) When designers focus on just these two things on the home page, users tell us the site is substantially more usable.”


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