ARE YOU FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON YOUR HOME PAGE?
I’ve been articulate with a customer who wants a small changes finished to her home page. She has a lot of ideas and forked me to multiform alternative aspirant sites for examples of the sorts of things she wanted.
However, whilst her home page can approaching be softened by a small redesigning, the subject whinging at me is “should it be redesigned?”
Her home page has an altogether rebound rate of around 30-35%. The rebound rate from Google is about 12%, and the normal time on page is around a notation (there’s utterly a lot of content) so obviously it is you do something right.
Sure, I could modernise the colors and move a small calm around. But is this a great have have use of of of my time and her income when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?
Yes, that’s a lot for a singular page. However, when the alternative pages on her site paint over 75% of pageviews, it creates clarity to outlay many of my time on their upkeep and alleviation rsther than than on the home page.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. It’s a small site, so roughly all of those pages fool around an critical in pushing business.
However, I do not recollect when a small of these alternative pages haven’t had their calm updated. And, visually unequivocally small has been finished from a design standpoint.
This is because I attempted to insist that her home page is essentially far reduction critical than she thinks.
Your Home Page is Like a Hotel Lobby
Jared Spool argues that it is the least critical page on your site, and whilst I’m not sure that I could go that far, I feel that the significance is positively farfetched in the minds of many people.
I explained to her that she should think of her home page similar to the run of a road house (an thought coined, I believe, additionally by Jared Spool).
When visitors arrive at your hotel, positively they should find that the run represents the road house favorably. It should be attractive, spacious, with superb lighting, welcoming colors, and the peculiar underline here and there.
The run should have it easy for the caller to asian themselves — to see where the front table is and where the rises are. It should have it easy for the guest to find out any critical report at a peek — arriving events or where the discussion is being held.
However, hotels have been in conclusion judged by the peculiarity of their rooms. The final road house I stayed in was the W in Seattle. While it has a good lobby, it’s the bedrooms that unequivocally have a stay there memorable.
And so it is on the web. A web site will live or die on the peculiarity of the ‘rooms’ — the calm and design of the interior pages, be they headlines articles, product pages, or amicable networking tools.
The home page, similar to a road house lobby, is something that visitors pass by to get to where they wish to go. It is not a end in and of itself.
Consequently, it should be treated with colour as such and the time outlayed updating and enhancing it (or even conceptualizing it in the initial place) should simulate the significance to the classification compared with the rest of the web site.
Clients and stakeholders love to concentration on the home page, forcing designers to forever tweak this and move that (particularly the colors, for a small reason). In fact, designers lend towards to overly concentration on the home page too, mostly giving the page design for rest of the site short shrift.
I essentially cite to design web sites from the ‘ground up,’ starting with the interior template(s). Since many of a web site is going to have have use of of this template doesn’t it have clarity for it to be the main concentration of your design efforts?
For a new redesign project, I asked the engineer to begin with a key interior page template and not be concerned about the home page design. It was tough for them to do, but right away we have an glorious design for the core product report pages.
The home page design has come sincerely of course and organically out of the design of these interior pages. It only finished clarity to:
- Lay it out in a sure approach that highlights the key report we wish to call out
- Use a sold design character to have it fit with the rest of the site
As a result, the home page design went by far fewer revisions than I expected, that left us with some-more time to concentration on the design of the rest of the site.
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Are You Focusing Too Much on Your Home Page?
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