Once upon a time there were what during the 90’s we used to call “web portals”. These portals usually were the main websites of ISPs which provided users with an easy way to start browsing the Internet.
Nowadays, the way we consume news and information changed drastically. Our main portal became search engines (i.e. Google) and we use to go straight to the content we are interested in. This means that the “homepage” of a website, blog or news website makes much less sense these days.
I was slowly realizing this when looking at my blog’s analytics: only 3% of my blog traffic is directed to my homepage. Over 80% of my readers come across my blog thanks to Google and my first referral website is now Twitter. It’s very rare that my homepage is the landing page from those websites.
Yesterday I was reading an interesting article on Forbes.com which gave me another confirmation of that thesis:
But because of search engines, users end up never encountering that home page or availing themselves of the careful arrangement of the site’s material.
Instead, they’re taken directly to the inside page that has the specific material they are looking for. And once they find what they’re looking for, they’re off somewhere else.
That being said, do developers have to pay much attention on how the home page is designed? I think that homepages still matter for corporate websites or specific services, but in my experience I think that the homepage of a news website or blog could be only a logo plus a search engine which searches for content over that site. Period.
What do you think? Do webpages still matter for news websites?
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- Looking Forward to Viveri: An Experimental Search Site (on10.net)
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- How to Expand Google’s Universal Search (makeuseof.com)
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