Successful Home Pages
Posted in Knowledge Base and Planning 2 years, 11 months ago at 4:06 pm
Readings
- Homepage Real Estate Allocation
- Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, February 10, 2003
- Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
- Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 12, 2002
- Promotion Tip: Splash Pages May Drown Your Site
- Larisa Thomason, Senior Web Analyst, NetMechanic, Inc. 2008.
- Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them?
- Smashing Magazine’s Design Showcase. 2007.
- Four Types of Webpages To Avoid
- Patrick Burt. 2007
While testing your home page
Include a real or greeked sample of each kind of content.
- Greeking Machine
- Duck Island. Choose from a variety of types of gibberish language to populate your prototype pages.
- Lorem-ipsum.info
- Several languages available.
The home page is the most impressionable page of a web site; most visitors will see it before any others. Content on the home page will vary depending on the kind of web site you’re building.
Consider these types of sites and typical home page content:
Blog/news/zine
- Short description of the site’s purpose
- News (takes up most of the real estate)
- Photos
- Category and search navigation
- Outside links, ads and affiliations
- Contact info
Portal
- Short description of the site’s purpose
- Short description of the company
- Few menu items taking up lots of real estate
- Contact/location links
Intranet
- Short description of the site’s purpose
- My ToDos
- Internal news
- Tips
- Login
- Staff highlight
Entertainment
- Short description of the site’s purpose
- Media (takes up most of the real estate)
- Tips & Tricks
- Participant highlights
- Ads
Ecommerce
- Specials and product highlights
- Success Stories
- List of tutorial titles
- How to get started
- Order status help
Web Services
- Prompt to sign up
- Login
- Why and How
- List of Tools
- Featured solutions
