Keeping your home page clean
Posted in Design, Usability on: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by Paul Boag
One of the most common sticking points I encounter when developing a website is the sign off of the home page. Client’s want to cram it with as much content as possible, while the designer is seeking to maintain the integrity of the design. So, what is the best way of avoiding this kind of confrontation?
I am sure you have come across requests like this before…
I need the logo bigger, more space for news, events and features, shortcuts to key applications, more prominent navigation and can you make the search stand out. Oh yes, and I don’t want the page to scroll at 800 by 600. Also, sales would like to add banner advertising across the top and down the side.
In many cases these absurd scenarios occur because of a perception that the home page is the most valuable location on a website. As a result all the various departments clammer to get their piece of the limelight.
In the fight for real estate, usability and design aesthetics are often the first causalities. Below I outline four techniques I am starting to use in order to bring some sanity back to the home page scramble.
Recognizing the changing role of the home page
One of the first steps to home page utopia is to get the stakeholders (those who are fighting for home page prominence) to recognise that the home page doesn’t have the importance that it once did. In fact I think it would be fair to say that we are going to see a continued decline in the traffic going to home pages over the coming years.
Jakob Nielsen in his book “Prioritizing Web Usability” talks about a change he is seeing in the way users are interacting with the web.
There was a time, says Nielsen, when users who had a specific task would go to a site where they thought that tasks could be completed. For example, if they wanted information on the Crisis in Darfur they would go directly to CNN or the BBC. However, more and more it would appear that instead of turning to a specific site and finding content via that sites home page, they are instead looking to search engines. The search engine takes the user directly to the information they require thereby completely bypassing the sites home page. Obviously, this deep linking seriously reduces the prominence of the home page.
Add to this the rise of RSS feeds and more people accessing information via mobile devices, and you begin to see the focus shifting from the website home page towards the individual pages of content. That is not to say home pages are no longer important, they are simply not as important as once they were and so do not justify the level of competition they receive in some organisations.
Don’t rush into the home page
Another technique I am starting to use more often is to avoid addressing the home page too early in the process. By starting with standard textual pages (which after all make up the majority of the site) you get to set the design style before it gets diluted by the land grab for home page real estate. Once the client has “bought in” to the design they will perceive it as being more important and so are less likely to allow it to be railroaded by content demands.
However, delaying the home page development isn’t just a “political” move. It is also the right thing to do. A home page should reflect the sites content at the highest level and signpost the user to key content deeper in the site. In the majority of projects I work on the client hasn’t finalized all of the content in the initial design stage. In my opinion it is hard to create an effective home page until you have a full understanding of what content it is meant to signpost and represent.
Communicating the importance of white space
In the case of home page design the heart of the conflict between designer and client is often a perception of the importance of white space. Every designer knows that white space is a fundamental tool of good design, but we are often bad at expressing why in a way the client can associate with.
This is an area I have been thinking about a lot recently and I have come up with a possible solution which I am yet to try. It was inspired by the book “The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)” which I am currently in the process of reading. On the subject of white space the author says:
“The opportunity lost by increasing the amount of blank space is gained back with enhanced attention on what remains.”
Or in other words; the more you add the less importance anything has.
I think this is where we sometimes go wrong as designers. We sell white space on the basis that it looks better. Instead we should be selling it on the basis that every item you add to the page detracts from the rest.
To help the client think this through I am wondering whether a point system of some kind might help. You might want to suggest that a user has 10 points worth of attention they can give to the home page. Every “module of content” added to the home page takes a minimum of 1 point. More points should be assigned to more important elements. This approach will quickly show that the more you add to a page, the more likely important elements are going to get lost in the crowd.
I am not sure whether the approach would work in practice or not, but it does strike me as a good way to focus the clients mind on what is important.
Embrace rather than fearing the fold
The killer blow to any home page design is when the client says: oh yes, and we want all of that to fit above the fold
. This inevitably leads to smaller typefaces and less white space.
I think we need to work hard as designers to dispel the myth that users never scroll. Sure, users don’t always scroll but that is okay as long as we put less important elements further down the page.
The idea that users don’t scroll is horribly out of date and probably comes from the very early writings of Jakob Nielsen. However as early as 1997 he was suggesting that users were becoming more comfortable with the idea.
If your client needs further proof then install Crazy Egg or some other heat map service on the clients site. This will actually show where on the page a user chooses to click. You will see a decline lower on the page but not enough to justify putting everything above the fold.
The emphasis should be prioritizing content rather than cramming everything into the small space above this ill defined line that we call the fold.
But how?
Of course the fundamental problem with educating our clients, is that in many cases you cannot talk to the people that are demanding home page space. This is a very real problem and in many cases there is little you can do to overcome it. However I was impressed by Shane Diffily’s idea of running stakeholder workshops in his recent A List Apart article. Having a workshop at the beginning of a project where you can talk about good practice and dispel some of these common myths is a superb idea and should help a lot of projects run that much smoother.
14 Comments
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Paul, thanks for a well conceived and timely article. My day job is web development for county government, and your description of how “all the various departments clammer to get their piece of the limelight” is painfully familiar.
A lightbulb went off reading the “don’t rush the home page” section. I’ll agree and take pleasure in the point that “it’s the right thing to do”, but the “political” impact is enough to warrant this approach for me. Definitely using this approach on my next project.
I’ve been using the “if everything is important than nothing is important” approach for awhile now and can report some success. Still working on the fear of scrolling, though.
I will use your point on how users access content increasingly through search engines, thus bypassing the home page, on my next project. How have your clients been receiving this? With skepticism or exclamations of “aha, good point”?
Something else I push for when we get yet another “can I have a link on the homepage request” is to explain the importance of context. I have argued (and indeed won) many times that it is far better to link from a page whcih contains content related to their product or service.
The Jakob Nielsen “users don’t scroll” excuse also annoys me when I hear it; if these people kept their knowledge up to date they would now see that Jakob Nielsen now says that users DO scroll!!
Good article Paul!
Of course users scroll and you can help them with anchors above the fold line.
White space can also be black space, if you like coloured fonts on black backgrounds, I do, it does not have to be like white paper transferred to the screen.
Some of my pages are over 600 Kb of mainly text, I stretch below the fold into a 70 page printout and Australian Universities seem to have no trouble with it, I have not had a single negative comment on large pages, but I think the home page should be a liitle more concise and not try to cover everything on the site in a miniscule font, but the basics in a reasonable sized font larger than 1 em for accessibility and readability of older users. No you can’t have banner advertising, but you can have a link to your company department pages.
Call it space rather than white space, Black space rules in my world? White space is for traditional paper based publishing, you can have a white page if you select a print stylesheet.
Tim
Nice post.
Often, the target of the client seems to crash into the designer’s one.
Great article and will hopefully teach people to think about how they (re)design their home page in the future.
I know myself when for clients we have to create a prototype its hard to come up with the total overall design when just doing the home page. We have started to do two pages which I think gives the user a better understanding.
Thanks for the read.
Good points about the meddlesome behaviour of clients during the construction of their website. My strategy is to start removing their sense of creative input entitlement as soon as possible in the development process.
I describe good design in term of time value. If you can understand whether or not a website has what you are looking for within a matter of seconds of visiting the homepage then, your user will consider you a more valuable resource for not having wasted his time the first time they arrived. Which, ultimately lead to users coming back and spreading the word about your site to their friends and colleagues.
This, I explain to the client(and any designer I have the ear of), has far more significant implications on the website’s ROI than the typical distraction stacked homepage prevalent in the market today.
Some good points there. I agree about what you have to say on the topic of cramming everything in above the fold – in many cases, it’s simply not workable, although popular links should be kept above it.
Also, I agree with what you said about search engines, and users making use of them to directly pass to the content they want. I do still believe that the home page is important for making a good first impression (say, if the link is coming from a business card rather than a search engine).
Great Article! Many times I find myself, not necessarily the client, trying to cram every bit of information I can into the home page of varying projects. I really like the angle you have helped me to view this problem from. Thanks!
In a past life I was a translator, and it makes total sense to me when I read that should leave the homepage till last. It is the title of the site and in my experience, no way can you do justice to a title till you have a feel for all the content inside .
if a client were to ever bring up a recommendation by Jakob Nielson I would simply refer them (the client) to Nielson’s website http://www.useit.com/. That should dispel any credibility.
Very interesting article and I agree with most of it. One point that I haven’t seen come through on my work sites (yet?) is the decreasing importance of the homepage. The homepage accounts for over 90% of landings into the site – the second highest is 0.35%
Somewhat related article:
http://www.uie.com/articles/prioritizing_design_time/
how users access content increasingly through search engines ؟
Sweet article. The stakeholder workshops are definitely a good idea, that helps a lot. What also helps is to take it one step back with the client. What are his goals and what does he want to achieve with the website? I know you are not always allowed to think with the client but it changes the mindset from I can’t do this and I want you to do this to ‘How can we optimize our goals and result? And what do we need for that?