This series describes some of the design and strategy decisions that one faces when developing a website, especially one with a social networking component or a community focus. The first part in this series takes a look at the home page. What types of home page designs work and why?

Why is the home page important?

For the majority of visitors and websites, the home page is the landing page of a website. It is also the page where the goals and expectations of visitors are the most diverse. This makes it important to balance the page and keep it relevant for all visitor segments.

What are the options?

For sites that have an element of social networking, community or reviews, there are essentially three options for home page design – walled garden, content only or hybrid. Let’s look at some examples of each.

Walled Garden

An example of such a home page is Facebook.com. The page acts like a wall and lets the visitor know that all the action is in the walled garden.

This makes sense when all content is only consumed by members. It also sends a message that privacy is taken very seriously since no content is visible from the home page. For new member-only content sites, this is difficult to pull off, as the home page might scare away first time visitors, making growth needlessly dependent on network effects and word of mouth.

Content Only

Myspace (at least the German site) falls into this category because there is only a small, unobtrusive box for users to log in or register. The focus is clearly on content and no real attempt is made to describe the service or entice new visitors to register. To be honest, I don’t see many advantages to this approach in the case of MySpace. They might be better off with a walled garden approach like Facebook and Twitter to attract new users.

It does, however, make sense for sites where content can be consumed by any type of visitor. Epinions, for example, has this type of start page and it works well. In this case it encourages the visitor to explore the site (consuming content) while minimizing distractions.

Hybrid

This is a mixture of content and a call to action to register. This type of page shows openness. It tries to balance the needs of new visitors and returning members, each of whom have very different intentions on the site. Gdgt does this quite well, as does Vimeo. Both sites rely on user-generated content but allow regular visitors to consume all of the content. For new sites, this is probably the best way to go.

Has anyone noticed other home page designs that don’t fall into one of these categories?

The next part in this series will take a look at how the home page might change if a user is logged in and revisits the home page.