Minimalist or Comprehensive Home Pages
Today at our impromptu LDSFriends meeting my business partners and I had a debate that I’ve had over and over. It’s about the home page design. Should we make it minimalist or do we use it to showcase all the incredible things we have for our visitors? We want people to come, and we want them to sign up. Those are our initial goals. Generally speaking programmers are more likely to want to show everything. They are concerned about the user.
One business partner wants a description of each feature and to showcase all of them. I’m arguing for a minimal approach highlighting a few main categories or features. We eventually came to a consensus. I’m purposefully not linking to LDSFriends when I speak of it because most of the design is still from 1996 and almost nothing we’ve done is live. But we’re building a social network for the LDS church.
In my experience, your home page should not be too distracting. You have a goal – like in our case – to entice people to sign up. If you offer too many things people often choose NONE of them. Most people throw up a lot of offers or information hoping you’ll act on at least one.
As an example of the minimalist approach, there is Google. Google could display ads or information for their other services on www.google.com but they don’t. A visit to their social network Orkut shows a very simple interface. In fact, Google properties are by nature minimalist. So are their blogs. Again, no advertising, not even for their own products. Well, except for a small one that says, “powered by Blogger.” This reflects Google’s bias towards information. However, they do advertise, and as we all know, are hugely profitable.
What is your take on this? Is it branding that Google and other’s have that defines their style. Or is it smart marketing?
2 Responses to “Minimalist or Comprehensive Home Pages”
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November 17th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Janet,
I think the test of a great website is whether is generates the results you’re looking for. For most people, that means turning visitors into buyers.
I write a lot about content marketing, including some examples of websites that have delivered measurable results for their owners.
By the way, I’m curious about all this affiliate marketing stuff. Isn’t it hard to separate what’s legit from people who are basically selling information about how to sell information. Everyone of those sites is an endless scroll with lots of testimonials ending up with a pitch to sell the inforproduct.
You seem like the real deal, so I’m curious about the whole affiliate marketing scene. My particular interest relates to a book I have coming out in January. It’s about content marketing: Get Content. Get Customers. You can download the eBook if you find the topic of interest. Obviously, I want to sell a lot of copies.
Thanks in advance for your feedback,
Newt
November 17th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Sorry for the typo–should be ‘it’ generates.
N.