This article was written in 2013. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

The homepage is not the face of your website

A while ago I wrote this quick post about the idea that the homepage is not important. Quite a few people took some time to write a reply, and in the end, it turned out that the wording I chose was not correct: the homepage is definitely important. Most people did agree though that it might indeed be less important than we sometimes think. Today I discussed this again with a colleague of mine. We agreed that the homepage should probably not be the first page to design, but he did emphasise the importance of it. He said that the homepage is the face of your website.

I don’t agree with that

The homepage is not the face of your website. The face is the first thing that everybody sees when they meet you, and many statistics show us that most visitors never get to see your homepage. This got me thinking. If it isn’t your face — and we for some reason decide we really need a biomorphic metaphor — what else could it be? The homepage is an important part of website — which we will call the body. And we definitely want it to look fabulous for the few people who see it. So instead of calling the homepage the face of our site, a more correct analogy would be to call it the buttocks of our site.

I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, hehehe.