An aspect of web design that can make or break the website’s appeal is the homepage. While a lot of visitors will be carried by the search engines to the insides of the website, most of them will resurface on the homepage if they are looking for more. From corporate portals to personal weblogs homepage is what stays behind with the visitors.

A lot of metaphors work for homepages - the front door, the face, the living room - whatever it is, the homepage represents your website and hence you in the virtual world. Homepage design should be given special attention to make sure that not only does it attract the visitors, but it also is useful to them. The for user paradigm applies the most here. There are multiple strategies for designing the homepage and it plays a different role depending on the nature of the website. Lets discuss some elements that can constitute a homepage.

Who Am I?

One of the most important responsibilities of a homepage is to provide basic information about the website and possibly about you. A website is seeded by a vision, it is important to express this vision to its visitors. This is something that can help to convert a new visitor into a regular user.

I have not come across any guidelines for this. In fact I have seen extremes of using a crisp one sentence tag line to an about blob to half a page dedicated to it, depending on how easy it is to convey. However, care should be taken that not all the information is put up on the homepage, it can turn into a too-much-information-too-soon scenario and possibly scare away the visitor.

Give me Fresh

Whether it is content or food, fresh is in demand. Homepage with fresh content gives direct access to the latest to the visitor and reflects activity on the website.

There are a lot of ways of putting the fresh content. A news oriented website can display featured articles, a weblog displays a number of most recent posts/entries or a corporate company can provide a quick view into the latest press reports or the latest products.

Move around

Homepage is one of the best locations to provide global navigation to your users. Along with the standard navigation menus, the homepage can deep link to specific insides of the website. This is especially useful for the regular visitors who visit the website with a specific purpose and want direct access to that content.

A homepage can be provided as a dashboard to its users. This is commonly seen in portals and personalized websites. The dashboard provides a peek under the hood and offers easy access to different actions that the user can perform. The dashboard also functions as an overview to its visitors. While designing homepage of a closed portal that showcased reports for one of my customers, I realized the users would visit the website once every couple of hours. Instead of detailed statistics, every visit was more geared towards getting an overview of the different reports. In such cases dashboards that offer summaries as well as options of drilling down to specific content details.

It is also important to provide one more ubiquitous mode of navigation - the search. Google is slowly becoming homepage of the WWW. If the visitor feels too bothered to comprehend the homepage, he/she can use the search box to get the content.

Hi …

One of the good practices is to acknowledge or identify an user. This helps the user to realise that he/she has been identified properly. Sometimes the homepage might not show any apparent difference in the layout after the login. Addressing the user is a good indication that the login is through and successful.

A good side-effect of this is that the website can use this to project a more human face to the user.

No Splash Screens

Once upon a time, a homepage was equated to a splash screen. A splash screen is directly borrowed from the desktop world, where it indicated loading of a heave application. However, it makes little sense in the web world. Typical splash screens carry heavy graphics with a link somewhere to enter the website. Along with the usability aspect, it also consumes visitor’s time.

As an analogy, splash screens like closed doors. In today’s open world, they’d better be open to welcome the visitors or bid them good bye.

Options

Homepage should also carry options that the visitor can choose. A very good example of such options is the language. With multinational companies offering the website in various languages, there is no better place to ask the user to select the language.

Another possible example is the type of user. This need not be displayed as an option, but as a navigation item. A website targeting various types of users can provide links to customized information for these users. Lot of financial institutions use this to direct users to dedicated sections. This is a good way rather than asking the user to paddle through a sea of information.

A lot more can be added to this, but I think this is enough for my first article here on fadtastic. Feel free to comment on this whether this rubs you on the right or wrong side, or if you want to add to this.

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