Tell HN: Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage

47 pointsbouncingsoul13 comments

Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage.

It seems obvious, right? But three or four times now I've read a post at some startup's blog and got interested in what they do, but I couldn't quickly get to their homepage – there was no link!

Make your logo link to your main site. Don't make it link to nothing and don't make it link to the first page of your blog. I am usually interested enough to hack the url, but it shouldn't be that hard.

(I was prompted to write this after reading the Heroku blog post about instant deployment and not being able to get to their homepage. But like I said this is definitely not the first time I've seen this.)

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Absolutely. I've come across so many startup blogs with great articles, but clicking the startup logo/name takes me to the blog homepage. Give me a link to your website homepage instead.

Here is an example of one that suffers from that problem:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

More than once has it happened to me where I click on the very prominent icon "stackoverflow: a programming community exploit" when I want to either check out some new feature implemented or read some question that is discussed in the blog but I am sent right back to the blog's home page and not the the site itself.

The link to the main site is right below the icon but the two should be swapped. The current way is just not consistent with my general web experience. Yes, a small inconvenience as a user but an inconvenience nonetheless.

I'd go one step further: Not only should you have your logo link back to your startup's main home page -- you should include a simple text link, with the right keywords in the anchor text, to link back.

This is for search engines (so if your blog pages start to accrue some SEO authority, you can pass some appropriate link-love back to yourself).

Standard is just to use alt text on your logo. That's better for accessibility, and doesn't take up extra space.

Wow, that's silly. Fixed - thanks.

This is a very good usability guideline. Make sure the sites under your own control link out in ways that help your other sites.

We have just completely integrated our blog into our main page design using a customized wordpres-theme (http://blog.helpedia.de/ -> sorry, only German). So the switch from blog to the main site couldn't be any easier.

Wikis, too. Kills me when I run across a wiki.hostname.com that has no link to hostname.com.

I think the problem (with blogs, wikis, ticket tracking, SCM systems) is that people stick to what came in the box and don't bother to tweak the templates for niceties like this.

We place the blog home link in the header and the link to our main site in the side content. Do you all think this suffers from the same problem? http://blog.flowmingle.com - thanks

Very true! I make reviews on my blog and several startups I cross paths with doesn't even have a small link to their main site from their blog. Very inconvenient.

I've seen this too, very annoying. Guy talks about his (ISV) business, but there's no link to be found, at least not in the time I searched.

hear hear, pet peeve of mine. I mean this seems like self promotion tip #1 right? But huge colorful links to your main product all over the place!

agree 100%! i tend to shoot the blog owner an email when i see this.

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