Has the homepage become redundant?

For many years, organizations focused on the Home Page as the Web page that visitors would arrive first when coming to their website. Great emphasis was placed on design and subsequent navigation from this page. With the improvements made in search algorithms by such powerhouses as Google and Yahoo, the home page has in some ways become redundant.

Over 60% of participants visiting your website, whether government or business, arrive on a page other than your home page. This is increasingly likely if you use a Site Map designed for search engines to easily index your site. We believe this number will only rise, especially if you are effective in your SEO work.People search the Web based on search terms they think are relevant to the information they want to recieve. If a search engine finds a page on your site relevant to the appropriate search term or keywords, then that is the page they will deliver in their results.

Searching for news or a specific product is likely to deliver the news or products page of your site, and that is where the person will arrive on your site. Our research in usability studies has shown that less than 40% of companies plan for this to happen. This means you may not be delivering as relevant a usability option as you might think. Many marketers and organizations think top-down in the development of their Information Architecture, and that made sense in Web 1.0 terms. There is an assumption that a person will visit your home page. This is not necessarily so.

Our research has indicated that a person arriving on a product page is then most likely (80% of the time) to then move to Corporate Information or the About Us sections. We believe this is a human nature action - the desire to understand who you are as an organization and find the “personal connection.” For established brands with strong brand presence, the action may be to research corporate financial results and press releases.

What Does This Mean?

This shift in participant (user) behaviour for an organization means increased attention to all aspects of your site and understanding how people move through your site, so that you can adapt pages based on visitor page trending. A good analytics package (such as WebTrends or Google Analytics) will show how people move through your website so you can make more informed decisions.