Page Types Guidelines - Homepage

Essential guidelines to use when building a home page.

Here we go page types, these are going to be very simple, very useful however because most sites have these kind of pages and so therefore it’s good to just get the best practice suited and then—the rest of your life. So homepage, your homepage almost without exceptions should have a really nice big bold statement that tells me what is you do. Unless you're so well known that it’s not necessary or you're so neat. The only people who are going to come to your website are people who already know what you do. If however you're just another digital marketing consultancy or whatever consultancy, your homepage make it really clear what is your consult on and specifically as possible. So, that I know whether what you do—I'm interested in. So, that’s what we do, tag line, a clear and simple page structure is simply you know hopefully you can—everything you’ve seen today and all the designs we’ve looked at, clutter design doesn’t work. Things with boxes, too many boxes don’t work because the page looks fractured. So, what you want is a nice clean simple clear design that leads the eye across it where you wanted to go, normally two or three columns is plenty. Any more than, it really just start looking to fractured and fragmented. Unique appearance is an interesting one. You’d be surprise when someone—and you ask someone to go back in the homepage surprising number of people get to the homepage don’t realize it’s the homepage and keep trying to get back to the homepage because the homepage didn’t look like a homepage. It just didn’t like any other number one of the section homepages, the model homepages is whatever. So, just give it a unique appearance on the site, and the tag line is obviously going to help say this is the homepage. Key content and features, this is really a place if you were to assume that the homepage is where people start most of their visits which may or may not be valid to assumption with search engines but that’s—there then we want to do is highlight key content, you know, interesting content has been posted recently. Recent case for this, you know, that makes you look like you're someone with something to offer and also of course shortcuts or direct access to the sexy bits, whatever the sexy bits of your site maybe. The sexy bits most likely are going to be if you got bunch of people who are beginning it’s going to be introductory guide to with our explanations off whatever, whatever. And for the experts, it’s going to be quick links to extenuate log in or you know—whatever is the experts wants. But what we want to try and think of is covering is reasonably possible, you know the main reason that someone arrives on your homepage covering them off and pointing people toward those areas. And of course the homepage and did every page probably going to have these utilities, links to about—I mean you know without search engines, it’s good for search engines but quite a lot of users actually like clicking the side map and just getting an idea of the scope of what it is you offer. And in some way you could argue your homepage should be in a way be a mini side map, it should kind of give you an overview of the—as you choose to do that. So, here we have a page Doctor Foster intelligence, if you didn’t already know what they did to, this will make you—okay, patient experience something to do with health, latest news, that’s nice but still is nowhere saying what it is actually do, just kind of a problem. This is a partnership between the information and I still not so if they give me the organizational state, but they're not telling me what it actually do. That’s kind of a problem. This is not just kind of a problem, this is a problem. I’d be strong than that. Here, they got latest news okay, I quite I like that. Here, they've got management information, marketing research services, social marketing information for the public. So, whatever you think about that at least they’ve tried what imagines to give you groups information to get you started. So, as a whole with the homepages—but without knowing what they actually do we couldn’t give you any, you know, we can't give much opinion on it because we got no idea what they do, what they actually are. And you could argue the fact, that if they did have—do you remember we’re talking earlier about different ways to get the same information, sometimes by audience by saying, this sort of person give me everything you’ve got, sometimes by saying I’m interested in this sort of topic give me everything you’ve got. Information for the public which seems to be a type of audience so logically, we would expect this box to be audiences and then here maybe you’d be public doctors, government, policy makers, whatever. That would seem to make more sense if you had audience groups together. And then here, you could—topics and there will be things like I don’t know healthcare, marketing services, they have a case maybe. So, you can see how’d they’ve tried to do certain things here, but it’s open to debate on how successful they’ve actually been.