Website Usability: The Home Page

Home Page Usability: So Much To Say So Little Time To Say It!

OK. We’ve covered deep link usability and in that post I told you that if done right, your interior pages will be bringing in 40% of your traffic. That leaves the majority of your visitors coming in through the front door. Another quick stat to throw out there is: the users that come in from somewhere else on your site, 75% of them will end up hitting your home page. This stat is lower on sites that have a root blog since more people are likely to hang out in the blog, but I measure the success of a blog directly to the number of visitors that DO go into the static site after hitting the blog.

I hope we have now agreed that the home page is important, in fact it is the most important page on your site. Today I am going to lay out some strategies to make the most out of your home page. One of the most fascinating stats I follow in analytics is “average time spent on”. Whether it is the time spent on the site or a page, this is a significant measuring stick of how usable your site is. I use Google Analytics now more than ever. In fact I used to resell Web Side Story and have been using that for years, but Google Analytics (it used to be Urchin before they bought it out) has really hit their stride. If for some crazy reason you aren’t tracking your website stats you really need to!

Looking back to my post about usability testing I told you how I break users down into 2 groups: experienced and not experienced. In plowing through 5 years of different usability tests in preparation for a major project (and for this blog series) I found some interesting facts. The average home page visit for an experienced user was 1o seconds less it was for the lesser experienced user! That means that the more a user uses the Internet the less patience they have with bad usability.

Looking at some general statistics available on the web as well as my own, I feel comfortable with the stat: 30 seconds is all you get! This isn’t TV after all, people are using the Internet as a tool more and more as their experience grows. Visitors don’t log on to space out after a hard day. Most content experts agree that all your pages, but more importantly your home page needs to be set up so visitors can scan a page, because they don’t READ it. My game plan is to keep the upper 700 pixels clear and concise, then put the paragraphs below for the search engines. Keep in mind that there is a limit to how much a page will be spidered.

30 seconds: A Home Page Usability Lifetime

Alright so you have half a minute, what are you going to do with it? Here are some of the primary things I try to communicate to a new visitor:

1. What website they are on. (I know that sounds ridiculous, but you would be surprised at what I’ve seen!)
2. What does this site have that will benefit the visitor.
3. A quick feeling about the company or site, who are you, what do you do, and most important what is new!
4. What choices do the user have and how do they get to the section that is relevant to them.

Keeping long winded paragraphs down to the bottom of the page is a good plan, but what do you put at the top of the site? Sure a nice graphic or Flash element is eye-catching, but you do have limited screen real estate so don’t waste a ton of it on something flashy. The fact is most people spend the majority of their 30 seconds figuring out where to go next, not reading the content, and certainly not reading it word for word. In number 3 in the above list I bolded “what do you do”, because it is important to get that message across, and get it across fast and furious!

One of the best parts of Google Analytics is the site overlay. It shows a picture of your site with little boxes over the links. These boxes show you what links the user clicks on to leave the home page. Here’s a screenshot of my site:

In conclusion it is best to take the most important parts of your online message and convey them clearly on your home page!