YouthNet blog

Tuesday Jul 03, 2007

The homepage is dead, long live the homepage

How important is a website's homepage?

It's natural to think of the homepage as one of the most crucial aspects of web development – get this wrong and you're stuffed. After all, it's the shop window; the entry point for your users and your big opportunity to push key content and services, promote your brand and, in commercial settings, get clicks on your advertising.

But the importance of the homepage is diminishing. In the initial portal-lead days of the web, users delved into the internet through their service providers' homepages. Not anymore. The whole concept of fixed, stand-alone websites is shifting as data is presented in multiple ways. The once powerful homepage is now playing a lesser role.
 
So why is the homepage not as relevant?

1.    The rise and rise of search engines

The majority of traffic to our youth website TheSite.org comes from search engine referrals. And these aren't links to our homepage but to pages deep within the site such as the England smoking ban (over 7,000 referrals from Google last month), drink driving and... threesomes. These people aren't coming through our homepage; they are looking for a specific piece of information. Consequently, our challenge is to create article-level pages that are usable, push the brand and offer further ongoing options for these users to explore other parts of the site. Most of these users will never even see the homepage.

2.    Browsing through RSS and other Web 2.0 entry points

Why visit a website to find out what's new when you can just browse through an RSS reader? RSS readers, along with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and embedded search boxes in browsers all provide direct routes to deep content on websites and circumvent any need to visit through a homepage.

3.    Syndicated content through other sites

This goes even further than the first two reasons. Not only are users not coming to your homepage, they might not even come to your site at all. Our content is syndicated through other sites (such as Ministry of Sound) and available through emerging devices such as digital TV and mobiles. Users are accessing our content but aren't coming anywhere near the site.

4.    Self-segmentation of audiences

Some of the regular users of TheSite.org are using the site for one purpose – discussion boards. They don't come through the homepage – they go directly to the boards (sometimes 3, 5, 10 times a day). The challenge for us is keeping this self-segmented group aware of changes on the rest of the site.

5.    The difficulty of building brand awareness and loyalty

Our brands are not famous. It's the brutal truth that awareness and 'memory' of our sites is low, even though we get pretty good traffic. We get lots of people coming, but not many of them make the mental leap of remembering us next time they have a problem or issue they need advice on. Consequently, they search Google instead of going directly to our homepage and searching TheSite.

And the upshot of all this? Of the 2.5m page impressions we get a month on TheSite.org, less than 2% are for the homepage. This is why we haven't invested heavily in the homepage.

Now ignore all of that

Despite what I've written above, we have just spent three months and a chunk of design, development and project management time redoing TheSite.org homepage.

Why?

The web may be changing dramatically, but the homepage still has a key role to play – and may even play a bigger part as we work on our brand awareness.

One outcome of this brand work should be more new people coming directly to the site through the homepage (rather than through search engines). These new users need to get the full flavour of the site from this first visit and we've built a homepage that reflects the site better. It's more dynamic, colourful and offers inroads to many more parts of the site. 

The big opportunity from the new homepage is building loyalty. We hope to convert these new users into regulars, who remember us and visit us directly when they need advice.