Archive for January, 2009

Homepage design principles – Revisited

January 30th, 2009

in the last few weeks I’ve been looking at a lot of homepages – good and bad ones. Looking at the ones I rated as good seem to have a similar pattern. I would like to call these principles of good homepage design and share it with yous :)

Your homepage – whether you’re selling something or just wanting to attract people to participate should have answers to the following questions in the following order:

  1. What is it? what am I looking at? – give me very clear, short description
  2. Why should I use it? – try to relate to me in some way
  3. Why should I use it? – give a bigger picture of why I should use it. Tell me the benefits.
  4. Who else is using it? What are they saying about it? – customer testimonials, news clips, etc that give credible raves about you
  5. Ok.. how and where do I start? – I’m sort of interested now, what do i do. Following the user’s eye and flow here is pretty important.

These principles are pretty much across websites that support popular and successful online tools and products now including:

http://www.highrisehq.com/
http://www.mint.com
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.everyblock.com/
http://www.ideo.com/

and so on…

Does your homepage follow these?



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