As visitors can arrive at any page on a site via search, are homepages still relevant? The NextStage CRO says it's about microbranding versus macrobranding.
Lately, I'm getting lots of questions about branding. It actually started about a month back. The questions pretty much overlapped and I decided to answer the most often asked ones in blog posts and in my AllBusiness.com column (see links at the end of this column).
One topic I didn't cover in great detail came from iMedia's own cover stories editor, Nanette Marcus, who asked me, "Site visitors are decreasingly entering via the homepage and instead are entering through other entry points, responding to an offer or a search inquiry. Are homepages still important? How can brands approach site design and messaging differently to leverage new site access patterns?"
This is a very rich topic. What follows is based on current work NextStage is doing with a number of clients and research recently completed by our European-based research team.
Homepages are still important... kind of
I explained to Nanette that homepages are still important and that how we define homepages is either changing or needs to be changed. Most people think of a site's homepage as the 0th page (tomographically) or base page. The idea of the homepage being a site's sole entry page has, I think, long been abandoned.
The way I've often described homepages to clients is with a front door metaphor. I go into this concept in detail in Attract and Stick, Part 2. That metaphor is useful in design, but it's losing its potency otherwise. The metaphor works like this: most homes have front doors that open to hallways. From this hallway you can explore the rest of the house. The metaphor of homepage as front door means your homepage must provide visitors with enough information for them to explore the rest of your website.
Now people are entering websites via search query and offer specific entry pages. The front door metaphor no longer holds because people are teleporting directly into your kitchen, seeing what you have on the stove, oven or fridge and leaving without exploring any other rooms. They're popping into your living room, seeing what book you're reading, what music you're listening to or TV show you're watching, and then they're going away without even stopping to say hello.
We're finding ourselves in a world of showpiece homes in a way. Each room must be inviting and rewarding in and of itself because visitors aren't interested in spending time with the homeowner any more, only in determining if the one room they're popping into has something they want or not.
Let's make sure we understand this very, very clearly. The implication of this new visitor methodology is that the traditional concept of the brand is losing value. People aren't associating value with a car company so much as they're associating value with a specific car that company makes. People aren't associating value with a cosmetics company so much as they're associating value with a specific grooming aide that company makes. This is one of the things NextStage's European researchers recently shared during a meeting, and I found it fascinating.
This result isn't Eurocentric, it is western centric. We have no data if this same phenomenon exists outside of the EU, USA and Canada.
Thus, the entry page that focuses on a specific car or hand lotion or food item or whatever must also serve as the "homepage" to a microsite. This microsite may be one, two or at most three pages within a larger website system, and its entire function is to "close the deal" for that car, hand lotion, food item, et cetera. Any recognition of the company's greater -- or macro -- brand is a happy coincidence because the greater effort must be in promoting the microbrand.
Repurposing "homepages"
I believe the traditional concept of a homepage still has value in the expanding web. The value now occurs at a different point in the buying cycle. Not long ago people would do their research then go to a website to learn more about the company, the company's products, so on and so forth.
Now people are doing the bulk of their buying research online. Search and offer-specific entry pages have to be simpler than traditional homepages because visitors aren't going to spend a lot of time figuring out where to go to do what they want to do. People entering a site via an offer or search query are essentially entering a site via a different mnemonic brand than what is traditionally recognized as a brand. Their purpose and goal is completely different from that of visitors coming in through the front door. Their mindset is more akin to the person at a fast-food drive-thru window. They're too busy to get out of the car. Their goal is to quickly get something they know they want and be on their way because they have other things to do. Specifically, things they place more value on than spending time with you and your site.
The new homepage purpose is very much a "comfort" and "trust" purpose. Visitors entering a homepage in the new web world are doing so because they want to get to know the company behind the site. They are the people who walk into an automotive showroom because they know they'll be in the market for a car a few months down the line. They don't want to buy a car today; they want to establish a relationship with the salesperson and the dealership. If things go well they'll come back and purchase a car.
Trust and comfort are easy to design for. Even more so if your site makes use of RIA and Rich Media.