[Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

[Sarah A. Rice]

>
>If we do decide to rethink the homepage it will be my job to design 
>a homepage that connects to and converts users who might not be 
>otherwise served (as mentioned, "browsers"), while not getting in 
>the way of the task-based shoppers who don't have much problem today.

If you take this approach, it seems a core question to ask would be 
how many people make it to the home page but no further? Is it a high 
rate (your other posts seem to indicate "no".) If higher conversion 
rate is your goal, it would seem necessary, even vital, to measure 
the whole site to see where the dropoff is. Does everyone enter the 
site via the home page? Many sites have other entry points due to 
search engines and other means of finding info. Are people entering 
other places as well and dropping off? What I'm trying to say is, if 
you want to address browsing issues, then it isn't necessarily a 
homepage issue, but a browsing issue, and should be addressed that 
way (unless all your data strongly supports that its a homepage 
browsing issue ONLY.)

I think you're on the right track to try and formulate the problem 
statement as clearly as possible (to make sure the real problem isn't 
that a few people in the branding department are sore because users 
aren't paying attention to all their hard work on the home page -- 
then its a personality and ego issue, not a website issue :-)

Sarah


Information Architect  .  408 315 8961  .  rice at seneb.com  .  www.seneb.com