Web Strategy
Ten Tips on Homepage Usability
Your homepage is the most important one on your Web site. It's where visitors
form first impressions and it's the entry point to marketing, sales, and service
content. Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir have created a very useful and attractive
book that can help you design a successful homepage or critique the one you
have. The tips below have been extracted from an extensive list in Homepage
Usability: 50 Web Sites Deconstructed. It's highly recommended.
- Who are you? Visitors need to know who you are, first thing. Your company
name and logo should be quickly visible, perhaps best placed in the upper
left corner. They should be big enough to digest, but not take too much
screen real estate.
- What do you do? Visitors also need to know what you do and perhaps why
it's special. You need a tag line that succinctly summarizes what you are
all about. Then you may need to provide other summary information that further
positions your organization.
- What's important? Take time to figure out what's most important in your
site from your visitor's point of view, and then make sure you provide clear
and direct access to those other pages from your homepage. Make your site
convenient to navigate.
- Homepage uniqueness: Your whole site should have functional and design
consistency, but your homepage should stand out from other pages. The visitor
should know immediately that she's on the homepage and not a subsidiary
page.
- Communication consistency: Your home page and your site in general should
be consistent in look and content with all other communication efforts -
whether brochures, business cards, letterhead, invoices, signage and so
on.
- Privacy: Web visitors are often concerned about identifying themselves
in any way because they suspect their personal information will be used
to aggravate them via Spam, calls, junk mail, and the like. If you take
information, make certain you have a privacy policy, explain it, and then
live with it.
- Out-facing language: Language in text and headings should be oriented
toward how the customer sees you and what she's likely to be interested
in, rather than how the customer fits into your business plan and organizational
structure.
- Primary navigation: Make it very easy for the visitor to understand how
to navigate your site, generally through a menu in a left-hand column. Make
the whole menu always visible. If the visitor doesn't see something immediately,
she may assume it isn't there. Navigation at the top of the page, especially
if it's above some graphics, tends to be ignored.
- Search: Every site, unless it's very small, should have a site search
capability. Put the search box in an obvious, easy to spot place, perhaps
at the top of your left-hand menu column. Make it wide enough to be usable
and put a "search" or "go" button next to it. Don't offer general Web searches.
It isn't necessary and you'll confuse the visitor.
- Animation: It's almost always a mistake on the home page (or any other
page), unless it illustrates a concept, but not if it's just intended to
attract attention. Site visitors deliberately tune out flashing fields and
may be annoyed enough to go someplace else.
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