by Thomas Brunt
OutFront News Article: December 18, 2002

I've been hearing my son's soccer coach yell that to my boy regularly this season.  There are times when Stuart seems to be more interested in showing what he can do than in winning the game.  Nobody has a problem with a bit of experimentation when you're up 4 to 1, but the coach and I would both prefer to see him go for what he knows when the game is tied and time is running out.

I see that as a pretty good analogy for the approach I take to working with my home page.  The more things you try on one page, the less effective any one thing is going to be.  The visitor only has so much attention she can pay to your home page.  You can divide that between a few things, but you can reach a point of diminishing marginal returns very quickly.

My experience has been that most home pages start out life very concise, but we all come up with offers or ideas that we want to try.  We know that those ideas or offers won't have much of a chance unless we put them on the home page.  That's what we do.  We put them there.  We make a little table cell for them and put in a blurb, or we just put in some little animated gif.  We give them some time to work, and sometimes they do.  Some have a bit of success.  Some have a bit more.  Some do great.  Some bomb.  Over time, our concise home page becomes anything but concise.  It starts looking more like a desperate plea.  Look at all the things I have for you.  Surely there must be something that interests you out of all this?

But a new visitor comes to a busy home page and says something like this. "Look at all these offers.  That's interesting.   Maybe I'll bookmark this and come back later when I have more time to explore."  Then you're added to the list of 10,000 or so bookmarks the user has already forgotten about -- game over.

I've been guilty of this kind of thing on OutFront many times.  The numbers can sometimes show you when you're headed in that direction.  Traffic to your home page remains constant.  Traffic beyond your home page falls.  Your home page is not the place where you make the sale.  Your home page is the place where you make it clear to the first time visitor that she/he has found the right site.  You can't make that clear with dazzling animation or cute sound effects.  You can only make that clear with an introductory paragraph or two that speaks directly to the issues that bring your target audience to you. 

Once you've made that clear, you have an opportunity to invite the visitor in to learn more -- not to tell her more about yourself or your organization -- to tell her more about what you or your organization can do for her.  The words "you" and "your" need to outnumber the words "me," "mine," "we," and "our."  The visitor doesn't really care about you, at least not on the first visit.  And she is not going to be back for a second visit unless convinced that you care about her and have some way to solve her problem. 

There will be plenty of times to try to get the visitor to do the things that you want her to do once you've earned trust, but you can't do that by trying to sell her on this that and the other thing as soon as she walks through the door.  You may have that well written introductory paragraph or two on your home page, but it's not all that useful if it doesn't get seen.  Do you have lots of other visual or actual noise going on that might distract the user from even noticing the information that's completely key to their decision whether or not to dig deeper into your site, subscribe to your mailing list, or ever come back again?

Don't try to do everything on the home page.  We all add things to our home pages regularly.  There's nothing wrong with experimenting when you're ahead 4 to 1, but there comes a time when you need to take an honest objective look at your home page to figure out what really needs to be there and what might be serving as little more than a distraction.  What better time than the end of the year? 

Take a look at your home page today.  What have you learned about your audience this year?  Does the first thing the visitor sees indicate that you actually know that person and why she is there?  Are you writing about your audience or yourself?  Is there so much text on the page that a visitor might decide to skim and miss something important?  Are there so many flashing doodads on your page that the visitor's eyes don't know where they're supposed to be?

Simplify the game.

t

Thomas Brunt
OutFront.net
A Microsoft FrontPage Learning Community