fadtastic posted a good article on home pages and initial-load experience. Here’s a taste:
Normally, what you want your home page to do is give is [sic] a balance between showing the user what they expect to see and attracting them to areas of your site they might not have known about but that you want them to be tempted by.
fadtastic: The New Shop Window / Home Page’s That Sell
The metaphor of a website’s home page as a storefront is a great one. Just as a shopper’s split-second glance in a store window helps determine whether they’ll soon part with their money, a user’s initial experience with a page determines its effectiveness, be it in terms of sales, influence, or branding.
The article mentions the importance of keeping the message simple, which I couldn’t agree with more. Present the necessary information in an obvious and intuitive fashion and then get out of the user’s way. The examples of Apple and Skype are very good. Both companies have always excelled at pragmatically delivering marketing dialogue.
Remember The Milk does it pretty well, too. It’s all about clearly presenting your message (what your product does, what your service can offer, what you want people to know) and leaving the fluff out.
I don’t totally agree with the inclusion of eBay as an example, though. It’s much better than it has been in the past, but still much more nervous and unintuitive than Apple or Skype. I’d be interested to see how the site would fair if they went for the Google search-box-and-button approach. That can be saved for another day and post, though.
The fadtastic article’s definitely worth checking out. There’s a bunch of other useful articles at the end of it too, for even further reading.
