Website Design - The Home Page - Giving your website firm roots

The Home Page - Giving your website firm roots

by Bill Marshall
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 12 Sep 2007

by Bill Marshall

The home page of your site serves many purposes. It's often the first page a users sees. It sets the style and tone for the other pages. It forms the basis of the navigation system. It's the page that's most often linked to from outside.

Let's take a look at these aspects in turn to see what effect they should have on your website design thinking.

1. First Contact

Because it's the most likely first page a visitor sees it's vital that the first impressions be good, otherwise it may be the last page they see as well. It needs to attract people to stay for longer than a few seconds - and research suggests that minds are made up in literally a few seconds. It needs to clearly identify who you are, what business you are in, and what you can do for them. If you have a Flash or Java applet that takes 30 seconds to load then you may already have exhausted the patience of most of your visitors even before they see what it does.

The Headings should be easy to find and read, and they should clearly indicate the purpose of the site. Equally the text should be easily readable at all resolutions - not so big that it looks enormous at 800x600 and not so small that it's unreadable at 1200x960. Keep lines and layout as simple and uncluttered as possible - you can have more complex stuff on deeper pages but on the home page you need more than anything else to get users to read your message and understand your site. Persuade them to stay a while; long enough to understand your navigation and visit some of the other pages and you've done the most important job that the home page needs to do.

2. Setting the Atmosphere

Unless there's a very good reason to have different pages in different styles then the visual style of the home page should be reflected in most of the other pages. It can be developed, made more interesting and complex, adapted and adjusted; but there should usually be some connection, some common theme that is used throughout the site. Otherwise the user can easily be confused; unsure if they are still on the same site or not. Confused users are less likely to trust the site or order from it.

3. Linking the pages together and pointing towards them

No matter how confused a user gets, whether by your fault or their own, they should always be able to get back to the home page in one click. That fact gives the home page a most important function of being the root of the site, the safe fallback position that the user can always get to if necessary. If the navigation on a complex site is contextual then it can be hard for the user to get to other parts of the site easily - the home page should mean they can get back to somewhere that allows them to start over.

4. External Link target

Because it is the most common target for external links, the home page needs to be the easiest page from which the search engine Spiders can find the rest of the site. While it's not necessary to be able to reach every other page directly in one click it is necessary that there not be too many levels to negotiate and most importantly there mustn't be anything that obstructs the spiders. JavaScript or Flash-based links will stop most spiders dead in their tracks.

From what we've seen it's obvious that the home page has a variety of functions. It's thus important that we don't load it with too much more. From an SEO perspective it shouldn't be the focus of all your search terms because that would mean having far more text on the full range of topics that the site covers that the page can handle from the other perspectives. Use it as a lead-in to the other pages which concentrate on these subjects and which are the targets for your search engine optimisation.