Are homepages still important? Yes, definitely. How we define homepages needs to change, though.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio.

People who enter 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. The solution is to microsite the search query or offer it within the greater brand site.

The analogy I use with clients is (surprise) very familiar to researchers. You're using a book as a reference source. That book is really a collection of papers on a given subject and edited by someone prominent in the field. What you really want to reference is one section, chapter or paper in the greater collection. Somewhere on the page is the title of the book you're looking in; somewhere else on the page is the title of the article/paper/section/chapter you're interested in.

People entering a site via an offer or search query are in much the same situation. The traditional brand is the book as a whole; the offer or search query is the part of the book you're interested in.

What this means is that the chapter/section/paper can't exist without the whole book. The design consideration is to dual brand the website visitor, first with what they came for, then with the traditional brand. The goal is to create an association that what they came for -- a microbrand, if you will -- is encompassed in the more traditional brand (macrobrand). You want visitors to appreciate that they can't get one without the other.

Interestingly enough, some of our researchers in Europe just finished a study that supports this somewhat. For example, what happens when an established microbrand goes away? Do consumers return to the macrobrand for a substitute, or do they leave the brand completely?.

In summary, every page is a homepage. This concept also deals with increasing distractions. Each page becomes a product/query/offering specific homepage; each microsite becomes one to two pages deep. Fewer pages equates to a lesser chance that the visitor will be distracted and pulled away from what they came to do (some form of conversion).