Homepage Guidelines

Homepage Guidelines
From Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir

A summary of this information is available in both Microsoft Word and Zip file formats.

Table of Contents :

Communicating the Site's Purpose
Communicating Information about Your Company
Content Writing
Links
Navigation

Communicating the Site's Purpose

Show the company name and/or logo in a reasonable size and noticeable location (usually the upper left corner).
Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does.
Emphasize what your site does that's valuable from the user's point of view, as well as how you differ from key competitors.
Emphasize the highest priority tasks so that users have a clear starting point on the homepage.
Clearly designate one page per site as the official homepage.
On your main company website, don't use the word website to refer to anything but the totality of the company's web presence.
Design the homepage to be clearly different from all other pages on the site.

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Communicating Information about Your Company

Group corporate information, such as About Us, Investor Relations, Press Room, Employment, and other information about the company, in one distinct area.
Include a homepage link to an About Us section that gives users an overview about the company and links to any relevant details about your products, services, company values, business proposition, management team, and so forth. The recommended name for this link is "About <name of company>".
If you want to get press coverage for your company, include a "Press Room" or "News Room" link on your homepage.
Present a unified face to the customer, in which the website is one of the touchpoints rather than an entity unto itself.
Include a "Contact Us" link on the homepage that goes to a page with all contact information for your company.
If you provide a "feedback" mechanism, specify the purpose of the link and whether it will be read by customer service or the webmaster, and so forth..
Don't include internal company information (which is targeted for employees and should go on the intranet) on the public website.
If your site gathers any customer information, include a "Privacy Policy" link on the homepage.
Explain how the website makes money if it's not self-evident.

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Content Writing

Use customer-focused language. Label sections and categories according to the value they hold for the customer, not according to what they do for your company.
Avoid redundant content.
Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying.
Use consistent capitalization and other style standards.
Don't label a clearly defined area of the page if the content is sufficiently self-explanatory.
Avoid single-item categories and single-item bulleted lists.
Use non-breaking spaces between words in phrases that need to go together in order to be scannable and understood.
Only use imperative language such as "Enter a City or Zip Code" for mandatory tasks, or quantify the statement appropriately.
Spell out abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, and immediately follow them by the abbreviation, in the first instance.
Avoid exclamation marks.
Use all uppercase letters sparingly or not at all as a formatting style.
Avoid using spaces and punctuation inappropriately, for emphasis.
Revealing Content Through Examples
Use examples to reveal the site's content, rather than just describing it.
For each example, have a link that goes directly to the detailed page for that example, rather than to a general category page of which that item is a part.
Provide a link to a broader category next to the specific example.
Make sure it's obvious which links lead to follow-up information about each example and which links lead to general information about the category as a whole.
Archives and Accessing Past Content
Make it easy to access anything that has been recently featured on your homepage, for example, in the last two weeks or month, by providing a list of recent features as well as putting recent items into the permanent archives.

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Links

Differentiate links and make them scannable.
Don't use generic instructions, such as "Click Here" as a link name.
Don't use generic links, such as "More ..." at the end of a list of items.
Allow link colors to show visited and unvisited states.
Don't use the word "Links" to indicate links on the page. Show that things are links by underlining them and coloring them blue.
If a link does something other than go to another Web page, such as linking to a PDF file or launching an audio or video player, email message, or another application, make sure the link explicitly indicates what will happen.

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Navigation

Locate the primary navigation area in a highly noticeable place, preferably directly adjacent to the main body of the page.
Group items in the navigation area so that similar items are next to each other.
Don't provide multiple navigation areas for the same type of links.
Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage.
Don't use made-up words for category navigation choices. Categories need to be immediately differentiable from each other -- if users don't understand your made-up terminology, it will be impossible for them to differentiate categories.
If you have a shopping cart feature on your site, include a link to it on the homepage.
Use icons in navigation only if they help users to recognize a class of items immediately, such as new items, sale items, or video content.

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