Yesterday, I read an entry about the death of the homepage on websites and I remembered that I had written about the same topic many years ago. The basic idea is that a large percentage of your visitors will be coming from links from other sites like Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, and Reddit, so they won’t be hitting your homepage directly. Because of this, some people tend to think that it makes your homepage less important. I have to disagree.

The homepage is probably the most important page for your regular visitors and as your site grows, the percentage of this userbase grows as well. If the homepage is dying then what is there to replace it? Nothing, because logic says there has to be some page available when they hit the root of your site. I thought about this for a second and figured that if you didn’t want to have a real homepage on a blog you could make your latest entry the homepage by default. Jason Santa Maria almost does this by making the homepage only show his latest article. I’m sure other people have already designed their sites like this so don’t think I am that much of a creative genius to come up with the concept myself.

With the amount of people that are starting to jump directly to internal pages on your site, it just means more care needs to be taken in how you can get them to browse other pages of your site. Many people do this by having a related posts section or fill their sidebars with other sections of their site. Since I don’t have the statistics behind these things I don’t know how effective they are, but from personal experience I don’t recall clicking on too many related posts sections and I only browse the sidebar if I am happy with the content that I came to read. I don’t like the sidebar distracting me from the reason why I am on the page.

It seems as though in their quest to achieve more page views, owners of websites forgot that they are trying to get people to read or view the content on their site. Is the value to a TV exec having people flick through channels every three seconds or having them sit through an entire program? Could you imagine reading a book and on every page there was a sidebar with tons of information that didn’t relate to the content of the page? I’m not saying that books and websites are the same, but I like to think that we can provide an experience similar to that of books where our visitors can read content without being prohibited by a categories sidebar.

If you have read an entry by Dustin Curtis then there is a good chance that you enjoyed the experience. I say experience instead of entry because going to a page there is an experience. There is a unique design to the content and when you read an entry that is all that you are reading. He has ads on his site, comments and a colophon, but while you are reading his content he allows you to only focus on that. In a perfect world, this is how the website reading experience occurs to me. However, I understand the need to make money so ads fill your sidebar and you really want people to bounce around your site because that increases page views. A mistake we make though is that we assume it works, but many times it just works because we are the only resource for the visitor to use. Once they find something better that offers them a greater experience they will bounce.

To prevent this from happening requires a new way of envisioning your internal pages and re-evaluating the goals of your site. Do you really care if people read the content on a page? You don’t think a sidebar filled with data distracts them at least subconsciously to the point where they can’t focus? Maybe I was wrong all along and list posts could generate some decent discussion if they weren’t on the same page fighting for attention with a ton of other things.

The Homepage As The Sitemap

In the discussion of news sites one of the issues I pointed out was that instead of trying to find a way to present all of their content they needed to find a better way to guide their readers deeper into their sites. Looking at the homepage of Dustin Curtis on the left, he doesn’t hide the fact that the homepage is nothing more than a door to the rest of his content. This design works well for a site that has an article every couple of weeks so don’t think I believe this is the perfect setup for every website out there. However, the purpose still holds true to the point of this article. Maybe homepages are no longer the great destinations they once were and now they are simply portals to the rest of your site. Yes, every site is a portal now.

This doesn’t give you free reign to think like the mega corps and try to post a link to every page on your site. You can’t force a visitor to explore your site, you can encourage them and many times that will fail. If they are intrigued enough to do so because of what they have seen on your site then they will do it. If they don’t want to they will bounce faster than a Digg user.

Looking at Smashing Magazine you can see how they are trying to move from a blog-type homepage to a portal and pulling it off successfully isn’t easy. Rarely do portal-type pages lend themselves to a two-column design, but the conventional wisdom for blog designs is that the homepage should look exactly like the rest of the pages. You need to stop thinking like that and assume that every section of your site deserves its own design. Does this require more work? Of course it does, but it enhances the user experience if it is done correctly. Maybe some sections benefit from the exact same layout and I’m not telling you that everything should always be unique, but at least give it some thought. Too often we fall into the trap of finding a layout and running with it everywhere.

Do you think a traditional blog-style homepage would work well with Drawar? I could have the articles on the left and the sidebar filled with the links, news, forums and gallery, but could you imagine how crowded every page would seem then? The homepage itself is already crowded to me and I’m looking to improve upon it shortly so it’s hard for me to see how I could fit all of that in a sidebar without distracting from the main purpose of a given page.

My friend Mark Fusco likes to remind me that the experience of a website is more than just the design. It is also the content and a number of other factors that bring it the total end experience to the user. It is quite possible to provide a good experience to users by having sidebars filled with adds and a large amount of extra data. I only know this because sites have been doing so for years and many of them are very successful.

Do you think the homepage as we used to portray it is dead and that it is time to re-evaluate how we look at the design of them?