What Kind of Front Page do You Need?
Much can be said about the index of your site’s contents. Usually, it’s the first thing people see. To show your direct traffic a good time, it makes sense that the way you have your home page set up serves a great deal of importance to your first impression.
There are many species of blogs, each with different needs. Each with different ways to get the most out of that first time visitor. The wrong home page can seriously confuse an innocent search engine goer, and the right one can give you one more return visitor.
The Personal Blog
Whether it’s attached to your name, some pseudonym or identity you personally maintain, the home page will not only speak volumes for the site as a whole, but also for you as a designer. I find it’s best to not get fancy here. When someone comes to me with a personal blog I am instantly thinking of a standard two column layout.
You don’t have to let the restrictive structure limit your creativity, though. That set up is the go-to standard for simple, personal sites, no matter the size. Three columns is hard to pull off well for this type of content. One thing you have to consider is not only the type of content and writer, but the quantity of it. If you happen to come across a small tech writer putting out four or five articles a day, you can go for a portal style or multiple column design.
Speaking of the “portal” or “magazine” style design- please as blogger avoid this if you aren’t producing the sheer amount of content to make these designs look the way they’re supposed to. With the recent influx of free and paid themes of this nature, everyone and their mother are ruining the idea by publishing new content once a week and displaying featured posts and 15 other ones.
Some of these sites get up to two month’s worth of content of the home page. As a rule, if content comes out as per usual, I like to display a week to a week and a half of articles on the front page.
The High Quality, Low Producing Blog
When you’ve got yourself a widely read blog that opts for more of a quality than sheer quantity, much like Blogtrepreneur, the approach can be much of the same. Here at Blogtrepreneur there may only be a couple posts a week, but it’s well worth it when they do come out. Because of this, I like to keep the articles front and center for as long as possible.
Personally, with the new Blogtrepreneur design, we went fairly standard in terms of structure. We wanted the latest article to stay in the limelight until the next one arrives, and it’s only a small scroll away.
Although, with articles that usually get pretty in depth, it’s a good idea to chop them off with WordPress’ “more” tag or something similar. This way your page doesn’t get stretched down too far and you get more content across.
Again, I’m going to say the magazine style design won’t work for the same reason as most personal blogs. There just isn’t enough content over the span of a week or so to keep your home page fresh.
Your aim should be to have new content every couple of days (or whatever be your regular schedule) so that if someone were to come via direct visit in correlation with your schedule, they would get something new every time. You can’t assume everyone is using RSS readers and ignore your home page.
The High Producing Blog
When you’re pushing multiple posts a day and it gets to the point where it would be too hard for the non-RSS reader to keep up, a more grid inspired portal style page can work. Sort of in the style of Problogger.
Although I can’t say I’m a fan of the commercial WordPress themes in this style, the way it has been done at Problogger gives the idea a good reputation.
The reason it works so well for them is because there is a clear definition of the sections. Whether it be recent posts, the featured post or the videos, they all have clearly defined sections of the page. There is no confusing whatsoever, which separates it from other blogs of this style.
Review sites (games, movies, etc…) also use this structure well, and it allows important or controversial content to stay on top for longer.
Lessons to Be Learned
In the end, what can we say of all this? I think it’s more about considering the type of site and their content (type and amount) when designing for them. There are popular sites that don’t use their design to their reader’s advantage, and there are most definitely unheard of sites with great designs structured well.
Design Thursdays on Blogtrepreneur are brought to you buy freelance web designer Connor Wilson.
