Where’s your home page?

I got an email from a friend of mine who occasionally reads this blog. His comments about one aspect of this website, and my subsequent reply, were interesting enough for me want to use them as the basis for this blog entry.

My friend wrote:

You don’t have a home page. You have articles, blog (as you websters say), but you don’t have a “home” page.

Call me old fashioned, but I like to see the cover of a book, magazine etc. before I open it up to read an article. To me, the home page gives me an introduction, a sense of welcoming and purpose to the site. I can see you contents running down the right hand side, but it’s just not working for me.

I just don’t get this on your website.

My response:

Yes, there is no “classic” home page as such. This was a deliberate decision and stems from my philosophy that the “classic” home page is redundant, unless it’s used to show the “latest news”, so to speak.

Although there are many websites out there which still have this “classic” home page, I see it as nothing more than a “brag” page which attempts to bamboozle the user by spinning bullshit with weasel words, to try and convince them how wonderful the company behind the website is. In my case, the “about” page serves that purpose, although I have tried hard not to appear as a weasel.

So in my case, the idea is to keep the content fresh and the home page is used purely as a summary. In fact, if you look at the “meta description” tag for the home page it only says “simplify your business”, as opposed to (the rather long) “specialising in database driven web applications with emphasis on ecommerce solutions and content management systems, utilising open systems development tools” for the “about” page.

In essence, I believe that for publicly accessable websites, the “classic” home page is dead, due to search engines like Google essentially being THE user interface in most cases. What I mean by that is that people come to your website to achieve their own goal, not to admire your design. I suspect (although I can’t yet prove it) that the overwhelming majority of “hits” on most public websites come from search engine referrals. My own website statistics certainly leads me to believe this to be the case.

If this is true, then the home page is indeed dead and I must be a trend-setter of sorts.

Trend-setter? I don’t know about that. But as this blog entry shows, there are much bigger experts then me who have reached the same conclusion.

Posted in Design, Google, Usability, Web by Ivan