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Gerry McGovern’s recent post on the decline of the home page reminded me of a similar post I wrote last year.
However, while I wholeheartedly agree with the overall point he is making, the issue is not that
…too many marketers and communicators are destroying whatever credibility their homepages have left with customers by filling them with useless graphics and meaningless words.
While this may have been true a few years ago, the majority of web teams have moved beyond happy, smiling faces and marketing jargon to creating home pages that are useful and engaging.
The problem is simply that there is an undue emphasis on a website’s home page relative to the attention it receives from its users. This is not surprising given that this is the main page by which the web team will be judged, whether it is by internal decision makers or external peers.
Your CEO (or other C-level exec) is not going to be too familiar with most of your website, but you can be sure he knows what the home page looks like. And may have some opinions on it…
The challenge is that the visitors to a website constitute a vast, silent majority while the opinions of those internal and external people who interact with and influence the web team have a far greater sway over where focus is placed.
The answer is, of course, metrics. If you can show that taking a holistic approach to your site and improving other parts of it can produce a higher return on investment than endlessly tweaking the home page, you will be able to keep your influencers happy and meet the needs of your visitors.
Good luck with that.
Featured on the Website Design Directory.
Classic Luxury is a high quality, clean and simple CSS-based template with three custom pages created by CssTemplateHeaven.
It is clean and has a lot of whitespace and nice typography. The code is well-organized and uses standards-based HTML and CSS.
Classic Luxury is great for portfolios and personal photo sites, and can be converted easily to a CMS theme as needed (such as Drupal or WordPress).
You may use this template in any projects you like (both personal/non-profit and commercial), but you cannot resell this pack’s source files.
Features
Most web designers have heard of Google Analytics
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Now that the iPhone has a true competitor in the Nexus One, I thought it would be interesting to see how their home pages compared. What is Google doing from an online standpoint to take on the smart phone market leader?
When I first viewed the Nexus One home page I was struck by how utilitarian it looked. The logo, the hero image of the phone, even the ‘buy now’ button — there is nothing compelling about what’s being presented. This really surprised me for such a major product launch.
Nexus One home page
Compare this to the iPhone home page, which oozes quality. The logo is bold and elegant and the hero imagery shows off the iPhone’s excellent industrial design to great effect. The autoplaying slideshow shows off the key features of the device without requiring any user interaction.
As soon as you arrive on the page, it starts telling you why you should buy an iPhone.
iPhone home page
I think it’s fair to say that the Nexus One can’t compete on visual design, both in terms of the hardware and software (take a closer look at the phone’s home screen to see what I mean).
So, I was surprised that more emphasis was not placed on the features where it does stand out. Why exactly is this phone a worthy competitor to the iPhone? It would benefit immensely from a more upfront presentation of what sets it apart from the iPhone. What exactly are its killer apps? Surely not Gmail and voicemail?
Apple uses the space below the main promo area to call out additional features and benefits, and Google would do well to do the same. Apple also enables the visitor to easily learn more about each feature. I don’t know where I’d go to dive deeper into the features of the Nexus One.
The Nexus One’s interactive demo is good once you start using it; however, there’s no guarantee how many features a user will click on, and even if they will realize that the image of the phone is interactive (we know how people hate to read instructional text). I couldn’t even tell that some parts of the phone were clickable without mousing over them.
Google should be much more proactive about what features the visitor should know about by displaying them automatically once the page loads. Otherwise, without the benefit of great overall site design, the page appears very static and boring.
The page would also benefit from tightening the layout and a greater application of polish to the visuals. For example, the Nexus One logo and the tagline lack association due to the spacing between them, and the hover effect for the already lackluster ‘buy now’ button adds nothing.
The Nexus One page hammers home the importance of good copywriting. There is nothing remotely compelling about the content on the page. “Web meets phone” is not a strong value proposition when compared with the iPhone. I think most people would agree that web has already met phone.
Compare “Click on an icon for a demo of each app” with “The fastest iPhone ever. Load web pages, launch apps, and more — even faster.” No contest.
Overall, the Nexus One site does a poor job of both launching and simply selling its product, especially when you consider the competitor it is going up against. Which is a shame, because I’ve heard it’s a pretty decent smart phone. You’ll just have to find that out from another website.
Options pages are becoming a core part of WordPress themes, particularly in premium ones where the competitive edge it gives is an essential.
Back in June we looked over Elegant Themes who are one of the top premium themes sites around and have just recreated their options page entirely.
This is a sponsored review, and as always, we’ll be focusing more on the design than the functionality to see what we can learn from it.
What Makes It Different?
The design of this page is stunning. It looks every bit as good as the theme itself, take a look and see (Click to see full size).
