1. Emphasize the unique nature of your site and what it offers that’s of value to users. Stress how your services differ from those of your direct or ‘key’ competitors. This is one of the most important issues in homepage design, and one of the least followed of all the guidelines. Websites typically hide their offerings in generic “marketing blurbs” that make very little impression on prospective customers.
Remember: The average internet shoppers typically query search engines and will only look at the top few offerings for only 3 to 4 seconds before surfing beyond that range. You have to ‘hook’ them at first glance.
2. Use a liquid layout, which allows the users to adjust the homepage size. Fight “frozen layouts” at all costs, it’s a worthy battle and one well worth repeating.
Remember: different users have different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. Don’t assume that everyone’s window width is 800 pixels: it’s too much for some users and too little for others.
3. Always use color to distinguish between “visited” & “unvisited” links. Knowing where you’ve been is only one of the three basic features that good navigation designs should support.
The other two are:
“Where am I?” and
“Where can I go?”
Remember: Navigational confusion results when designers disable one of the few useful features of a standard Web browser: having visited and unvisited links appear in different colors. (Typically, only 1/3 of corporate homepages tell users “at a glance” which site areas they’ve already seen. And violating this guideline is particularly harmful for older users.)
4. Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage. For example, use real photos that have an obvious connection to the content as opposed to using models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to pictures and gratuitous graphics can distract users from the actual or critical content you want them to see.
5. Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what your company does. In keeping with most advertising slogans, content-free tag lines abound. Once you’ve paid millions to get a useless slogan developed, it’s probably hard to accept that it won’t work for your website. Put the useless slogan in a graphic banner next to your logo, where it will be ignored. Then add a true tag line in plain-text format in the content area where people will actually see it.
6. Make it easy to access anything recently featured on your homepage. Users generally remember when they’ve seen something interesting on a homepage. However, unless that homepage lists recent features and offers links to them in the archive, users will never be able to find what they’re looking for on subsequent visits.
7. Always include a short site description in the window title. This is important for search engine visibility, so why not take advantage of this superior and cheap form of Internet marketing?
8. Don’t use a heading to label the search area; instead use a “Search” button to the right of the box. Now, this may seem to be a small point, but there’s no reason to label the search box if there’s a “Search” button right next to it. There is a simple design principle called, “less is more”, which says that extra elements in a dialogue not only distract your visitors from the salient points, but reduce their ability to understand an interface as well. (In other words, with less to consider, people understand more of what’s actually there.)
9. Give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost when presenting stock quotes. This principle not only applies to sites that provide stock quotes, either in the investor relations information or elsewhere. But with stock quotes, the general principle is to help users understand the relative magnitude of a change, and thus its true importance. (A same philosophy of design applies to presenting other statistics that change over time as well.)
10. Don’t be redundant and include an active link to the homepage on the home page itself. Never use a link that points to the current page. Typically, active links to current pages cause three problems:
If they click it, a link leading to the current page is an utter waste of users’ time. Worse, such links cause users to doubt whether they’re really at the location they think they’re at. Worst of all, if users do follow these no-op links they’ll be confused as to their new location, particularly if the page is scrolled back to the top.
Homepage links on the homepage typically result from using a universal navigation bar that includes “home” as an option. But when users are on a page that’s featured in the navbar, you should turn off that option’s link and highlight it in such as way that indicates that it’s the current location.
References in this article come from: Nielsen Norman Group, Useit.com
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By Jeremy Thompson About the poster: Jeremy Thompson is an Interactive Web & E-Commerce Consultant for Revolution Web Studios, consulting on web technologies for small business. You can reach him via email at Jeremy @ revolution web studios dot com.
