[Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

[Listera]

mfg345 at aol.com:

> Does homepage content need to be clicked on in order for the page to be
> successful (especially for a very strongly branded company)?

Short answer: No.

Longer: One would assume that the sign of success for an ecommerce *site* is
the revenue it generates. What happens on its homepage, click through rates,
etc. are orthogonal to the central problem. After all if most users come to
the site directly through other sources besides the homepage (search
engines, blogs, federated links, etc), who really cares what happens on the
seldom-seen home page?

So you can look at this issue as one of a sub-par home page or a sub-par
commercial outcome. If the problem is the former, you need to further
explain just what the *purpose* of the home page is besides being
index.html. This is why paying too much attention to sitemaps is
counter-productive, because IAs began to put too much emphasis on the
*positional* aspects of site components/architecture (which users don't get
to see), as opposed to functional aspects in actual user workflows and, as
you found out, actual traffic patterns.

Creating a "more engaging homepage" would not necessarily be beneficial.
What's the home page supposed to do? Unless you can define its mission
clearly, how can you troubleshoot its shortcomings? In the year of our lord
2005, where the notion of a "page" is giving way to micro-chunked, dynamic
data/info, home page is becoming an anachronism. But I digress. :-)

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."