So what then is the key to ensuring this doesn’t happen to your site?
Limit rather than confuse.

Ok, ok, so what do I mean? Quite simply, if a feature seems unnecessary or would benefit less than a fifth of our users, abstain. Don’t build it. Building a feature that is only useful to a small percentage of your users doesn’t make sense, especially from a return on investment perspective.

Remember MySpace? They let users run wild customizing and adding everything possible to their MySpace page. The result? Users were able to customize images, CSS, and it eventually lead to their pages being so complicated and confusing that usability went out the window. Each MySpace profile page had its own navigation scheme, or lack thereof, color scheme, and varying content. Users had too much choice, too many features.

The trend of limiting features is happening in Social Media sites, just look at MySpace versus Facebook, and Facebook versus Twitter. Users want great features but not at the expense of being confused. Build a few features and build them great.

Goals: sell online & offline products, sell user’s content & items, sign up new users, extend website’s reach

Audience: consumers, sellers, writers, businesses, developers and advertisers

Clear, consistent navigation.

The header of the homepage features the logo that doubles as a home button, a left hand navigation bar, an expanding search bar, a shopping cart button and a login for returning users. All of the elements remain consistent throughout the rest of the site, even the left hand navigation bar which condenses into a drop down on subpages to allow for underlying content to fill the full width of the page.

User specific content.

It’s true, Amazon knows what you like. At the top of the homepage it prompts you to create an account to receive “personalized recommendations”. It remembers what items you have searched for before (even if you haven’t logged in) and displays relevant and even alternative items.

Lots of content, many ways to search.

Content is king, at least on this site it is. Just in case you didn’t know how to navigate the site, they have you covered. You can list out every category of products with one click, browse every category from the homepage and search in any category or sub-category of products. Pay attention to the drop down menu to the left of the ultra-wide search box, it lists all the product categories alphabetically whereas the menu bar to the left lists all the categories by popularity.

Expandable design.

I am usually not a fan of websites that expand to fill the width the browser, mostly because it looks bad and rarely serves purpose beyond filling the screen. However, in the case of Amazon, they do a pretty good job of implementing an expandable design. The center column houses several rows of products based on the users browsing history that display anywhere from 3 to 7 (or more) products depending on the width of their browser. The only thing that doesn’t expand is the top row that houses an advertisement (currently displaying the Kindle 2), it simply center aligns and leaves an awkward white space to the left and right of it.

Ads in a Box.

Let’s face it, the whole site is an advertisement, even the content is well… selling content. But what they have done, is place all of the “real ads” in boxes on the right hand side, this not only breaks up the site a little, but it lends creditability to the “content” in the middle which is more specific to the user.

Conclusion: Although Amazon’s homepage is not the most creative one ever, it is extremely relevant and engaging. It is also extremely easy to navigate and takes into consideration multiple different user browsing habits. All in all, Amazon does an exceptional job of engaging and converting their users, and their revenue is proof of that.

What is a conversion you ask? A conversion happens when a user on your site takes an action that you intended. If you have an eCommerce site, and a visitor makes a purchase on your site, that’s a conversion.

Light vs Heavy

Now that we know what a conversion is, let’s talk about Heavy Conversions and Light Conversions.

A Heavy Conversion is an action that takes a lot from the user, such as a purchase, filling out a contact form, or becoming a member of your site. Typically, a Heavy Conversion requires the user to give something up, such as money.

A Light Conversion, in contrast, is one that requires very little from the user. Some examples of Light Conversions might be the time spent on the site or requesting a whitepaper.

Let’s face it, we all love the Heavy Conversions, but we need to remember the Light Conversions as well. If you pay attention to the Light Conversions, you can change your tactics and increase the amount of Heavy Conversions you get from your website.

The 3:1 Rule

As a rule of thumb, you should always have at least 3 Light Conversions for every 1 Heavy Conversion. The Light Conversions must back up or contradict the Heavy Conversion as well.

A Light Conversion that backs up the Heavy Conversion will show users are aware of your Heavy Conversion, but they need some more convincing. Whereas a Light Conversion that contradicts the Heavy Conversion will tell you that users are not aware or completely uninterested in what your Heavy Conversion is offering.

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.

1. Does it inspire the user to go further?

2. Does it empower the user to quickly navigate the site?

3. Is it clear to the user what you do?

4. Is the navigation established here or does it change? See article.

5. How easy is it to get to your contact information? Products? Services?

6. Does it show the latest and greatest things happening at your company?

That’s it for now. Feel free to leave comments and suggest more points for the list.

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.
5. #5 Facebook. This site has probably the most consistent navigation so far, it has a “home” link and the logo also doubles to reveal a “home” icon as well. It would be interesting to know how many of their users click on one over the other.
6. #6 Windows Live. This search engine has a pretty simple-straight-forward navigation. Similar to Yahoo, it also uses it’s name to act as the “home” link.
7. #7 MSN. Although the site has a somewhat consistent placement of the “home” link, it’s awkward place on the page (top right)  leads me to believe it is rarely used. Plus, when navigating different sections of the site, the site resizes and we see more prominent placement of sectional “home” links which undoubtedly cloud the users judgment (in some cases, under the logo, there were “home” links for the current section and sub-section, see example).
8. #8 Ebay. This site has a pretty consistent placement of the “home” link, it’s typically in the breadcrumb under the header. The only exception is on the Ebay Motors page and a couple of other places. I should mention that once on the Ebay Motors page, you have to search to find your way back to the Ebay homepage (especially because the logo no longer takes you back to it).
9. #9 Wikipedia. Not that you would really need to, but there really is no way of getting back to the “homepage” on this site. The functionality of the homepage is instead built into the left hand navigation throughout the site, which is fine, but why then have the homepage?
10. #10 Craigslist. There’s not much to say about the design, but the logo does always take you home except when you are looking at classifieds which only links back to the city you are under.

Ok, so now we have taken a good look at the top 10 websites and paid attention to how each of them overcame the location of the “home” button challenge. Now let’s take a quick look at the statistics:

7 out of 10 of the sites consistently used the logo to go home.

7 out of 10 have the “home” link located in the top left, consistently.

6 out of 10 actually use the word “home” in the link.

So what does this tell us? Well it shows how important the home link is to the top 10 and how consistently it is used. Honestly, I am suprised at the consistency. I wonder how true it stays past the top 10. Guess that’s another post.

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.

Each time a user comes to your website they are taking the time out of their busy life to get to know you. If it’s the first time they have come to your website, they will have to learn how to navigate you site and how to find the content they are looking for.

One of the primary purposes of the homepage is to set the tone for how the rest of the website should look and flow.

Once the user has determined the placement and style of the navigation on the homepage, it shouldn’t change as they progress through the website. For example, if the navigation bar on the homepage is located across the header of the website and has five main categories, it shouldn’t move to the left side of the website and have seven main categories (this also applies to link colors, buttons, and the location of elements such as the login or search bar). This type of inconsistent navigation may make sense when you are designing the website but consider the user first, and strongly consider their attention span.

Take the analogy of driving a car, you don’t want to learn how to drive it the first time only to find out half way down the road you have to learn how to drive the car all over again.