Overestimating the Home Page

Mac Slocum
October 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Brett Crosby from Google Analytics says a home page is often mistaken as the most important part of a Web site. From TechRadar:

Where are your visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing? It's often assumed user experience begins on the homepage, and this misconception drives many an ecommerce site to waste hours of design work in the wrong place. Search engines dig deeper into ecommerce sites, bringing visitors to not just 'electronics', but also televisions, MP3 players or sat navs. Analytics data will tell you where your real 'homepages' reside, so you can focus your design work there.

Crosby's point applies to content-based sites as well. Visitors often enter through an individual story page or blog post, not the home page. This is why there's value in serving up related posts, embedded links and call-outs to other features and tools on story-level pages.

(Via Jeremiah Owyang's Twitter stream)

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