Nice post on the "death of the homepage"
Rick Stratton has a great post up on the Feed.Us blog about how the once-vital homepage of your Web site is "dying."
Rick's point is that Google Search, in addition to the dawn of RSS feeds, has made your internal "article pages" as important (or more so) than your homepage.
Here is a quote from that story:
"Yes, the article page is the new front page," said Nick. "The front page of a website will always be important, especially for your regular readers. But, especially on news style websites, the majority of readers, and the vast majority of new readers, will arrive at an inside page first. They may in fact never see your front page. So your inside pages need to be designed as if they were the first things people see - including any key calls to action." Luke Beatty, founder of AssociatedContent.com, agrees: "homepages are for portals almost exclusively nowadays. The homepage has been made obsolete by the link economy and search."
Rick's post is dead-on. It also supports the important fact that we try to hammer home with our clients: successful online campaigns are built on content and engagement, not eyeballs and widgets.
There still are so many Web sites out there who focus solely on their homepage, loading it up with static widgets and budgets that nobody uses, and ignoring the actual internal content that makes a campaign successful.
Then they purchase Google Keyword or Facebook ads and drive people to their static homepage, which is useless. Why, you ask? Simple: these types of ads should drive people to an "internal" page with specific content you want people to view or, more importantly, a page in which you specifically engage your viewers. (For example, drive them to an internal page where you TV ads are posted, or a sign up page to get involved, or a place where they can comment or interact.)
Nice post by Rick. It's a simple principle — yet one that so many people still ignore.
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