Does Your Blog's Homepage Work?

When it comes to CMS, blogging platforms are nearly perfect for info-based websites. Wordpress, Drupal, Blogger and the others allow for the instant publishing of material that can easily be visually organized with plugins and widgets.

How Users Use the Web

Blogging platforms are incredible content publishing platforms. How one uses the platform to organize the content can is essential to getting results from visitors. People often act in a rather peculiar manner that's hard, if not impossible, for us to plan on without statistical analysis. Web usage is no different. How we design and organize websites and blogs can have a profound impact on everything from ad revenues to subscriptions to bounce rates.

The study of how websites can work more efficiently because of design and organizational changes is called web "usability", and is often a forgotten part of design, especially in a Web 2.0 era. Design is often seen as something based on tech fashion rather than content digestion, as reported by BBC in their article "Web 2.0 'neglecting good design".

With a growing emphasis on pizazz and flashy interface, many sites ignore basic usability principles of design. A recent article by PC Pro, appropriately entitled "Recipe for a billion-dollar website", presents that the mega websites often achieved their success through web usability. Facebook and Myspace, for example, made it easier to contribute to word-of-mouth marketing through invitation forms.

In the article, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen (also featured in the BBC article) argues that the next online "big thing" can be achieved by simply finding weak areas of usability on existing sites. The key to getting bigger is getting better, and getting better through increased ease of use. At the risk of stating the obvious: the more usable a website is, the more used it gets. Be more usable will get you get used more, which means you'll make money at a higher rate.

Instant Information is the Key

One of the expectations found in a Web 2.0 internet is instant information gratification. With increased internet speeds, strengthened search engine algorithms, and constant access to the Web, most users expect to find what they want instantly.

Any functional web design should be based upon this premise, especially those websites targeting search engine traffic. Remember, search engine visitors are the most goal oriented of all traffic sources, having literally gone to a "search" engine to find information regarding a word or concept.

Instant gratification of what this searcher wants means the searcher is much less likely to hit "back" and leave the site.

Chronic Chronological Logic

"Out of the box" blogging platforms begin with the homepage of the website with the last few posts organized in a chronological fashion. The home page is the blog. This is readily helpful for returning traffic looking for the most recent updates, but is a bounce-rate nightmare for search engine traffic.

For the first time visitor who is generally uncertain about the nature of the entire niche, it means one big info-searching headache. Unless the most recent post on the blog was an introduction, the new visitor will have to go out of her way to find what she's looking for.

When people first see your site, they don't want to see your most recent posts, they want to see an introduction and navigation to get to the information that best helps them achieve their goals. (If I were one to point fingers, I might even subtly suggest that the first few blogs on Google for "make money online" are the epitome of this chronological design flaw. Of course, perhaps I simply misunderstand their business models. Still, it's interesting to consider how the design funnels the newbie traffic.)

Of course, for many niches this isn't necessarily a problem, supposing every page, including individual posts, have instant navigation to cornerstone articles, and the topic is one that only those acquainted with the niche would google. For example, "internet marketing" is a phrase that random people don't Google. But for most websites ("flat stomach exercises", "Philosophy of Objectivism", "ways to make money") should be geared especially towards the first-time visitor.

The reasoning is based on the frequency that the homepage is used. Referring to Jakob Nielsen once again: "The homepage is still important, and you should continue to ensure homepage usability for two main reasons: The homepage is typically the single most-visited page, because the deep entry points are scattered across a vast number of interior pages. The homepage is the orienteering point for visitors who arrive through deep links and then decide to explore the site further."

Making Use of Usability

So what to do? There are dozens of possibilities, each effectively increasing usability, feeding info to the first time visitor, cutting bounce rates, increasing subscriptions, etc.

Static Homepage

The quickest and easiest way to rid to problem is to add a "blog" page to the website, and move the main index of chronologically organized posts to that page. Doing this while making the homepage to be a static introduction with links to important articles would readily solve the issue.

Semi-Static Homepage

The semi-static homepage is a great mix between the traditional chronologically ordered list of recent articles and a static page. For more information, check out this free tutorial.

There are other methods plausible, of course, such as focusing all SEO efforts on specific non-homepage pages and posts, thereby causing the homepage to not actually be the main recipient of new search engine traffic.

However, in the end, the fundamental principle of usability is whatever works. Try out some alternatives to whatever you're using now, browse around the possible methods for giving your traffic what it's looking for.

The foundation of web usability for info-based websites is simple, as Nielsen summarized: "People give up if the item is not found where it's expected to be." How do you handle balancing organization and instant info gratification? How can we make sure the home page funnels traffic to the appropriate posts/pages?