[Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

[mfg345 at aol.com]

To clarify a bit, the brand is not at all promotional and the site is 
seen foremost as branding tool, despite doing excellent business - we 
get good traffic and have a great conversion rate (twice the industry 
averages I've read in various sources).

The homepage content is used to support the brand positioning more than 
it does to promote any products or programs. To me that makes it 
obvious why people in our usability tests people tended to not spend a 
lot of time on, and certainly not read the homepage - they are already 
brand aware and just want to accomplish their goal. Certainly this 
could be a factor of the testing environment, but those results tend to 
be enforced by analytics.

My real question was (and it should be obvious which side of the debate 
I was on here) if people are finding what they want and buying it in 
numbers much higher than other ecommerce sites, why does it matter that 
they aren't clicking on the homepage content - but you put it in 
excellent perspective that maybe there really isn't much difference 
between content and navigation.

-----Original Message-----
From: Stewart Dean <stew8dean at hotmail.com>
To: mfg345 at aol.com; sigia-l at asis.org
Sent: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:53:16 +0000
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

Interesting results. I presumed it was dependent on what the page 
contained.

My view is that the first page needs to communicate where the user is 
and
what the site owner is offering and have one clear focus on the page 
(lots
of even weighted items leads to confusion). It then needs start 
delivering
on the main purpose of the site on the front - so if it's about brand
experience it starts there, if it's ecommerce then there are items to 
buy
etc. Farily obvious but it does put your 'links' issue into context I 
hope.
Links should not only just be seen as navigation but also content - they
inform the user as well as providing a journey. As always getting the 
right
level of links / information is key.

Stew Dean