How Not to Design a Home Page | Hacker News Reader

How Not to Design a Home Page

academicvc.com

135 pointsmattculbreth24 comments

I came on as the lead designer at The Business Journals late last year after this redesign was launched -- and while I disagree with the 99.5% number -- I agree 100% that there was lots of room for improvement.

And that's why we're rolling out a redesign of the main homepage in a couple of weeks:

http://cl.ly/25071M0m1R2t3Z0F053B

There are a lot of factors at work with the design of any homepage, and that was certainly the case with the current design -- really tight deadline, new CMS, work was contracted out to a design agency, etc.

But our great local business reporting deserved better and I'm happy to say we're getting there.

The content classifications are arguable. The main headline is about a movie, which is a million-dollar investment and business; and it's Friday, peak day when moviegoing and news consumption overlap. I think it'd be quite reasonable to count that as business news. The distinction between navigation and business news can also be fuzzy; it's not clear why the bottom-left links to headlines count as navigation but the bottom-center links count as content. Finally, everything below the fold is ignored, where the proportion of content does improve. (Above-the-foldness is relevant but not the entire story.)

The classifying was obviously done with an agenda in mind to push this story; take it with a grain of salt. (Don't get me wrong, the page is indeed still content-light and fluff-heavy, but to cite 99.5% is misleading.)

Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone:

http://imgur.com/QVpwz

The web as the gods — or at least Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen — intended! That content would even render and navigate nicely in Lynx.

It'd be far from the first site with a much more usable mobile version.

It's funny how the solution to solving web page navigation is to reinvent Gopher.

Our entire industry is Buddhist metaphysics writ small, particularly the circle of death and rebirth.

Ideas in this industry never die. They merely turn up later with different names.

I'm always shocked when I see screenshots with ads on webpages, with adblock plus, I've basically forgotten that's what the web looks like to a lot of people. I can't imagine using the web without adblock.

And flashblock.

Same here. Whenever I go on news websites, I find the stark white spaces that would otherwise be noisy, "loud" ads is much more comforting.

There is a competitive advantage for startups that embrace this. Hipmunk gets a lot of their user experience love by eliminating the single digit content problem that Stephen describes here vs. Expedia, Travelocity, etc. They even have a slide that illustrates the wasted space on competitor sites with color boxes.

This is a bizjournals.com site - They run 41 of these city specific business journal sites as online companions to a weekly print edition of the journal.

There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

> There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that this is not in disagreement with the author's point.

If the same critiques can be made of any newspaper or online news site - then why choose this one? What makes the Atlanta Business Journal site(one of 41 others) even worth writing about?

Measuring generously, 284×22 are devoted to news. That’s half a percent for content, 99.5% other stuff.

Alas, it's not such a mystery if you read that as "99.5% profit."

True, but I would say that it is at the expense of long term value. If visitors recognize that the publication no longer delivers what is expected they'll stop coming, which lowers the value of the ad space.

These are not independent variables though. People won't visit your site just to see the ads (milliondollarwebpage notwithstanding). In order for your ads to generate revenue you need content that people want to see. And you need people to revisit your site often.

If you just cram a lot of ads into a page you'll increase revenues for a little while, then your readership goes away and then your cpm rates go way down.

If you ensure your site has engaging content and is a pleasurable experience for your readers then you'll be able to make more revenue off of fewer ads. More so if you go the extra mile and ensure your ads are high quality and relevant to the audience (to the degree to where eventually they almost become endorsements and recommendations). Take a look at penny-arcade.com, for example, I can guarantee they make plenty off of those ads and they wouldn't be doing better if they'd simply crammed the screen 99% full with other ads.

It's just as important to cultivate your own brand (which is ultimately what you are selling by way of 3rd party advertising) as it is to hawk other people's brands.

... and the idea is that there are advertisements which generate revenue on the second, third and fourth page in the site that they visit. So his 99.5% metric is that 60% or so of that screen is trying to drive traffic to other articles on the site.

Hmm, not sure I'm following you here.

What I was trying to connote is that 60%+ of that home page was devoted to driving traffic to other stories in the same site.

A publisher's home page shouldn't necessarily be a place for content (even though it is serving ads). A page's home page is to drive traffic to articles in the site (that _also_ serve ads); this is the 60% navigation and "Non-business Related Filler" that the article talks about.

If you think the entire purpose of a site is just to generate advertising revenue then you should give up, close down your site, and replace it with a domain parking site. You'll still get ad revenue but your costs will be almost nothing, and you won't have to put any work into it at all. It's win/win.

ATBNews is just badly named. They write about more than just Business news so its an injustice to them criticize them for not listing only business news.

I think there are plenty of examples of poorly designed web pages out there (most are poorly designed). The trick is describing what makes a great home page and why. Even without the color coding I think many of us could see how poorly laid out this page is.

Could someone please explain what, exactly, is wrong with that page? I mean, other than the fact that it's full of ads.

Edit: This is not a troll post. I really don't see anything wrong with that site, but apparently lots of other people do.

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