What purpose should the homepage serve?

Every website has a homepage. But what should the homepage do? What purpose should it serve?

The homepage is a lot like the cover of a book. It needs to quickly convey to the user what the purpose of the website is, much like a book cover must convey what genre of book is. It also has to convince the user to spend more time reading and exploring its content.

The homepage must inspire the user to go deeper into the site, just like a book cover must convince the browser to read through its contents.

Let’s get down to it, below is a checklist of items that you should strongly consider when reviewing your homepage. I have put them in order of importance. Keep in mind, based on the goals for your website one or more of these may not be applicable for you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where should the home button go?

Recently I was on a website that had no visible means of returning to the homepage from a subpage, even the logo was not a link. Then I began to wonder how much of a role the “home” button played in the major leagues. So I set out to review the top 10 sites according to Alexa.

Here are my findings, broken down by each site and in the order of their popularity by Alexa:

1. #1 Google. Getting back to the homepage on Google is rarely needed because of the search bar built into literally every page of the site. Because of this, there really is no “home” button, rather the logo in most cases leads back to the homepage.
2. #2 Yahoo! The homepage is filled with more content than the Times. Rather effectively, almost every subsection of the site has a “Yahoo” homepage link, and usually in the exact same top-left position.
3. #3 MySpace. Upon launch this site was a user experience nightmare. Now it seems like they have switched gears and really unified the navigation system and even have a “home” button.
4. #4 YouTube. The main navbar remains mostly consistent throughout the site (has a “home” button) and only disappears on specific pages with just the logo to return to the homepage. Read the rest of this entry »

Simple, beautiful websites.

It may sound strange, but one of our goals at Inovat this year will be to focus on building simple, beautiful websites. Why? Not because simple is always better, in fact, sometimes simple doesn’t cut it. Not because we cannot do complex, see PlanetEarthPlay.com. Because simple, we think, is typically better for our clients.

Why is simple better for our clients? Because our clients hire us to build them a website that does something. That something could be a user purchasing a t-shirt or joining a mailing list. It could also be a user simply finding out more information about our client.

A simple navigational structure is easy to navigate. A simple cms is easy to update. Most importantly, a simple website doesn’t get in the user’s way.