Part One: Homepage Re-Design – Fight the Urge

Welcome to part one of our soon-to-be four-part series on crafting the ideal homepage for your organization’s web site. Let’s jump right in!

The homepage is the most important page on your web site. It directs users to other pages and tells the story behind your organization, and it must do this as succinctly and clearly as possible.

What is the urge?

The urge that exists in many organizations – especially larger organizations – is to put every little bit of seemingly essential information on the homepage. If it’s important to you, it must be important to the user, right? Wrong.

Think of the homepage as one of those big directory maps that are displayed at the entrances of shopping malls. The map shows a clean layout of the mall and offers a simple directory for finding the store you’re looking for. Everything is crisp, clean and clear.

Now, say for example, that same shopping mall map is your typical cluttered homepage. The mall layout and store directory might be there, but it would be overwhelmed with individual store advertisements, menus from the various food court establishments, deals and discounts, unnecessary photos and graphics, and—well—you get the point.

There’s a reason why that shopping mall map is clean and direct. Its primary purpose is to greet new visitors to the mall and to tell them where to go. It has a clearly defined task and target audience, and it caters its message solely to meet those needs.

So it’s time to start thinking more like a shopping mall and to fight the urge to overwhelm your homepage with every tidbit of information.

Clear. Concise. Consistent.

Those are the hallmarks of a good homepage and what we’ll be discussing in this series of posts.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Understanding Your Audience.