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The Triumvirate of Home Page Design
February 12, 2005 |
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Seductive art, compelling interaction, valuable
information. In working with a client on the redesign
of their five-year-old site, that's what I've observed are
the three hallmarks of great home pages lately.
This installment of Before & After is actually being written
to tell you about a B&A redesign on another site. There's an
article at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/great-homepages-really-suck that
shows before-and-after designs for the home page of a home
manufacturer. It's definitely worth a look. I'll wait for you
here. La de da.
However much you agree with the redesign, it reminds me of
my own findings a while ago about home
page design. When
working with a client recently, I had to try to boil down home
page
design
to a reproducible
formula.
Now
bear
in
mind this was for the technology arm of a Fortune 100 company,
so whatever their ultimate objectives, they at least needed
to have a clear idea of what the state of the art was.
Seductive Art
I thought
of the great mini-videos on Macromedia.com.
In the video below
(still image below), the pencil appears
to erase the image: 
Compelling Interaction
And I thought
of the
interactively animated but not-overly-artsy menus of LiveMeeting.com: 
And the new point at which the bar has been raised for interactivity,
by laszlosystems.
In the following demo (still image below) the new frontier
of "rich Internet applications" (aka Flash, or my preference,
"single-page-apps") shows just how powerful an online store
can be:
It's so much fun to play with these animations that you can't
help but poke around the sites.
Valuable Information
As for the final leg in the tripod, valuable information,
no single site comes to mind at the moment, but there are many.
The Microsoft site is rich with stuff I need, as is Amazon
if you are fishing for
book info,
or Ebay, if you want the market price on a 1965 ESR Digicomp
computer. But whatever you need, valuable information is the
endpoint of most web journeys.
Try to build a bad website that includes these three ingredients.
I'll bet you can't do it. —www.jackbellis.com
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