Our homepage is not that important
Friday, 15 August 2008
Web designers and new website owners tend to spend gobs of time scrutinizing the homepage of a new site. In my opinion the homepage (at least for a site like ours) is not that important. These are the reasons why:
1. The homepage is rarely the entry point for visitors to a website. Web sites are typically found through searches and viral link exchanges. I cannot control whether the engines pick up the homepage of our site or one of the internal pages like the library or this blog.
2. For our site, there are several destinations within the site and the homepage is really just a place that has links to those destinations. The homepage is doing exactly what it was originally created to do which is be a guide or index to the rest of the site. So I could just put a list of links on the homepage, some text, and thats it. So for now, thats exactly what is up there.
3. Keeping the homepage simple will direct to people to the few links you have listed on the homepage. There are six links on our homepage.
Check out our new homepage here and please comment if anyone thinks my theory on a simple homepage is horse hockey.
