[Sigia-l] Featured Content Areas

[Katherine Lumb]

Hello All:

Can anyone direct me to information on best practices on FCAs (Featured Content Areas)? By FCAs, I mean areas on a home page that showcase and direct users to content deeper in a site. I'm interested in any facts, statistics or anecdotes about the minimum content necessary in an FCA to motivate the user to click. Any info on how too much content in an FCA loses the user's attention and discourages clicks would be gravy.

I have a client who puts lots of FCAs on their intranet home page. They use these FCAs to advertise company news articles. Currently, they show the article's entire lead paragraph in each FCA. In the redesign process for this intranet, we're pushing our client to surface tools, forms and other content the average user needs quick access to in the course of a day's work. But because the governing body for the intranet is also the department in charge of corporate communications, they pushed their agenda through at the expense of other stakeholders. So, we're losing real estate to all these lead paragraphs from articles about the new SVP of Finance, and the new corporate compliance initiative, and blah blah blah. I'd like to at least make a convincing argument to get these FCAs as small as possible.

Please send your response to me and I'll summarize for the list.

Thanks much,

K

> Katherine K. Lumb   Content Designer
> p 646.336.3418   f 646.336.3433   klumb at semaphorepartners.com
> .......................................................................
> 
> Semaphore Partners     www.semaphorepartners.com
> 
> "Top 15 Interactive Agencies"  2002 Advertising Age
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>