Anatomy Of A Homepage Design — A UX Perspective (Part 1)

Anatomy Of A Homepage — A UX Perspective (Part 1)

Designing a beautiful, crisp and effective homepage has become a significant challenge. With so many websites fighting to capture a user’s attention, good UX is the first step to having a better chance at this.

Introduction

In the modern times of the internet, homepages are no longer the starting point of a website.

People can search for the exact thing they are looking for via search engines and land on the correct page they want, totally bypassing the homepage.

Earlier, homepages were a concise presentation of the entire website and a high take-off point to its other pages.

Today, different sections of a website can have their own’ landing pages’ which are different from the homepage but end up looking like individual homepages in their own right.

This ends up making the actual homepage a bit redundant.

Such a situation brings in great confusion about how to create the information architecture of a website.

More than that, it brings in some fundamental questions:

– What is the homepage?

– What is a homepage for?

– Which page qualifies as the homepage?

– What information should be put on the page?

The more you think about this, the more confusing it gets.

For example, why can’t the ‘Contact Us’ page be the homepage?

Since getting in contact is the end goal anyway, so why not cut to the chase?

If you start to strip a homepage down to its bare basics, you begin to realise that there is very little purposeful information. Everything else is adding to the clutter and confusion.