So anyone that has spent any time in a web business has undoubtedly been in heated debates around the simple question “What should go on the home page of our site?”
From the sales & merchandising folks you’ll get “I want a bunch of offers and sales”
From the brand marketing people you’ll get “I want links to things that talk about our brand and tell people why they should buy our product”
From the design folks you’ll get “I want to make it easy for visitors to navigate to where they want to be”
So by taking everyone’s advice you end up with 100 links. But what is the right approach? Who gets what on the homepage? And is having too many options or links on the home page a bad thing that confuses customers and ultimately negatively affects conversions? And how do you quantify what should be there based on web metrics as opposed to business unit wishlists? Simply looking at click-throughs doesn’t answer the question. So blogistan, what is your take? (especially looking at you Avinash!)
7 responses so far ↓
Kristasphere // January 23, 2007 at 1:39 pm |
Jim: Companies’ home/landing page should reflect where that company is in terms of brand awareness in the marketplace as well as their market share. The web experience should flow like an electronic sales cycle. It should flow like==>Establish rapport, gain interest, determine needs, propose a solution, close the sale. To drop a customer immediately into a big sales promotion when you have negligible top-of-mind awareness is a total waste of money in my opinion.
I’ve kind of made a running study on my blog which looks at our competitors’ home/landing pages to see what corporate branding information they offer.(http://kristasphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/web-branding-site-critique-mercedes.html) My observation so far has been that the more well-established the brand is, the more promotional/sales content they feature. Using Apple as an example, you get the impression ‘you know who we are, you know what we do, what do you want to buy?’. There is very little if any ‘who is Apple?’ content. Most of their PR content centers around their (also very well known) executives and board members.
And as we saw by the ‘2nd coming’ reaction to MacWorld last week, they have a loyal fan/customer base (or cult some would argue), high brand awareness,personality, and image. Make an announcement and your stock goes up $5 within 2 hours? What I wouldn’t give for that kind of tech-love!
David Churbuck // January 24, 2007 at 8:26 am |
Read the Fortune best places to work issue and the sidebar on how Google handles design issues. It’s all about the metrics. Now numbers can’t drive a mission statement for a homepage — there’s some content that will never carry a PTI/conversion benefit — assuming you are talking a commerce site.
The bigger question in determining who gets turf on the homepage is the overall perceived mission of the web presence for the organization as a whole.
dc
Mike Burgess // January 25, 2007 at 12:33 am |
Interesting to read your thoughts on home page content. I agree with most of what you say but my experience has been mixed with regards to home pages. I hope you don’t mind me contributing.
Is it not better to confirm first how the client is going to market their site? Online and offline marketing require different aspects to getting the visitors to the site in the first place. I am not advocating the ’spamming’ of keywords or phrases but in my experience (which may be not as much as yours) having the company’s details on the front page will get them seen when they are marketing offline (brochures, signs etc.) but if they are relying on search engine traffic is it not better to advise the research of keywords/phrases and include this in a description of the company ( as well as the navigation links on the site). I have always found this to be more effective. As they say ‘content is king’.
Again it comes back to how they are marketing their site. I do agree with your thoughts about easy navigable sites. There is nothing worse than not being able to find what you need. Take a look at the S*ny site for instance. Sell! sell! sell!, but try and get some support! Made me think twice about buying one of their products.
Thank you for your interesting thoughts and I hope you didn’t mind me contributing (for what it is worth).
Avinash Kaushik // January 25, 2007 at 1:24 am |
Jim: I am sorry it took me two days to reply, life has been a blur recently. I do like your and here are my thoughts.
I have to fess up that I believe that the home pages are highly overrated in terms of their value. If you have done a half decent job of SEO (or more than half decent) then every page on your site is a home pages (and given that 80% of the web traffic starts at a search engine this is even more critical).
Business Owners are constantly surprised that just 10 – 30% of the site traffic typically sees the home page (as it should be). That kind of takes the wind out of their sails.
But if the home page is a political turf battle in your company (and I am not saying that it is for your company) then the best approach the humble little me has found is to defer to the customers (website visitors).
The home page of our company was a massive spam list of links and promotions just a short year and half ago. It is a brief collection of the most relevant links for our customers (that they have said they want).
How do you do this when your company founder personally wants to dictate what the home page should look like?
1) Have a MVT testing platform / strategy. You need to tell all these company stakeholders that you have the ability to take the greatest idea and the stupidest one and test it rapidly against key success metrics.
2) You will only partly win on the revenue argument: “We should have these links because we will sell more of x or z and that is great”. Loads of Senior Executives don’t care about money (I know that sounds hard to believe but it is true.
3) You should have a solid way of measuring Voice of Customer. We do both remote usability testing of people who are on our site right now and ask them what they think (we can see their desktops so we they are seeing). We also do the ACSI driven surveys that allow us to measure three important things: Customer Satisfaction, Primary Purpose and Task Completion Rates. We have integrated our surveys with our testing platform so after the test has been running for a week or so we can go back and slice and dice the data and see which version of the home page is performing well against Revenue, Task Completion (for each purpose that the customer came to the site) and Satisfaction. That declares the winner.
Very few company stake holders can argue against your ability to measure in such a way and optimize your home page to do the job that the customers come to your site for.
It is important to point out that this is not a one time deal (our home page has been the same for two months, we just finished a test and the winner will go live early next week, then we will try again to see if we can improve it based on new marketing ideas).
Hope this helps, thanks for the chance to contribute.
-Avinash.
The Challenge » Homepage’s content // January 25, 2007 at 5:52 pm |
[...] and colleague Jim, asks What goes on the homepage? I’ll try to give my point of view on the issue as smartly as I can, which actually means this [...]
hazenjames // January 25, 2007 at 10:56 pm |
Wow, I should ask open-ended questions more often! Traffic spikes and great thoughts from everyone and furthers my love of the wisdom of crowds. I’ll be honest I don’t know the right answer, but its interesting to read the different ideas.
Krista – agreed on the brand awareness. Apple doesn’t have to say much, cuz every media outlet does that for them.
David – correct we need to build metrics around the ’soft’ stuff and show those things have value just as commerce does
Mike – Thanks a ton for contributing, and feel free to do so anytime! Great point on the Sony site and something to keep in mind if people have never experienced your company before landing on the home page for the first time.
Avinash – as always, it is honor that you even read my mediocre blog. You hit a very important point about the long tail effect of all of the other pages that collectively make up much more of the entry points to the site than does the home page. When I was at IBM that was extremely valid, a little less so now because we probably don’t spend enough on Search. Absolutely agree on the A/B testing and relying on customers to decide what goes on there instead of throwing up on the customer and hoping they figure it out. And I hope to try out some of the techniques you mentioned. Seriously, how do you find the time to write such articulate, well-thought out responses amongst the other writing you do?
Esteban – I’ll give my take this weekend when I can think coherently. I loved reading your take on “the Challenge” Stay tuned.
Esteban // February 1, 2007 at 11:16 am |
Jim: Still waiting!
Aviansh: Agreed that with good SEO you can drive a lot of traffic “inside”; yet there might be print campaigns, TV ads, and other sort of non-web advertising that will just have a link to the homepage, since it’s easier for people to remember. Homepages have lost their “prima donna” place, but are yet core to many websites (if not all).