3by9

Homepage Intentions

Designers love to critique website homepages, and for a variety of reasons:

• Most visible page on the site
• The singular most important page on a site
• It’s the gateway to everything
• It’s the most challenging to design

A homepage starts off a user’s expectations for the rest of a website, and what is included on the homepage is a delicate balance of accomplishing the user’s goals while preserving the site’s goals. A user might want to learn more about a website, find information, signup for an account, but the site’s goals might be to get that user to click deeper into the site, visit their blog, subscribe to an RSS feed, etc. Parts of those goals overlap but mainly they don’t, and the push-pull between a site’s goals and the user’s goals are the variables in the designer’s head when they are polishing a homepage’s look, feel, and features.

Mahalo

Mahalo is Jason Calacanis’ new joint that aims to produce thousands of human-edited pages that hit the terms and topics that users search for the most. It’s a noble effort and they’re moving ahead rapidly. Let’s check out their homepage:

With Mahalo positioning itself as a type of human-powered search engine, it’s no surprise that they put a search box front and center on their homepage, similar to most other search engines. What’s interesting is what goes on below the search box, and that they have a link orgy that is very compact in its design. Obviously what they’re trying to do is give users instant access to the most fresh and relevant pages on the site (perhaps the most recently updated, the most recently created, the most popular, or the ones with the highest AdSense CPC payouts if I’m playing devil’s advocate) and they’re playing on the tendency of users to click on the targets presented to them. Jason is trying to push their Daily Video show heavily so they put that at the top of their link list. If you look at Mahalo’s Top 50 Pages you’ll see it’s dominated by video game content and celebrity news, and unsurprisingly those two categories are near the top of their homepage links as well. Although the visual design is a little crammed, it’s certainly useful to get people immediately visiting deep pages within your site.

Flickr

Flickr is one of the world’s largest photo sites, and is probably “the largest” if you don’t count the ones affiliated with gigantic social networks. I’ve decided to snap a shot of their homepage shown to users who are not logged in:

Flickr goes the minimal route and shows a highlighted photo (CC-licensed) along with some tour-related illustrations to get people to digg deeper. Flickr is clearly not interested in pageviews or having people browse random photos, they’re more focused on telling what their service does and having a visitor signup for an account. One thing this tells me (or any person analyzing their design) is that they’re not concerned with boosting pageviews or getting visitors deep into the site instantly, they’d rather present the case for their service more democratically and rely on users to decide for themselves.

MySpace and Facebook

MySpace and Facebook have been compared enough to have volumes of books written on their similarities and differences so I’ll spare you the obvious news:

MySpace is a mash of default blue hyperlinks combined with ads across the whole site. Facebook has a zen minimalist style and a clean CSS-based look. MySpace’s website goals include boosting pageviews wherever possible, and selling as much matching ad inventory as they can. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited a page on MySpace only to see the same ad being shown in multiple sizes which is a testament to Newscorp’s sales department. Facebook’s homepage has no ads, no photographs or images, and only minimal amounts of text where most of the phrases are links. Facebook could sell ads on their homepage and make millions but they chose to emphasize their spare design aesthetic instead. Reportedly their founder Mark turned down a billion dollar acquisition offer, and the whole Facebook mentality is a “do what we want to do” concept rather than more traditional business mindset. They are gaining ground on MySpace but are, and will probably forever be, in MySpace’s shadow. MySpace was built from the ground up to be a pageview monster with a million different things to click on or interact with on any given page, and that runs contrary to Facebook. In the long run I can see MySpace continually making solid revenues based on tried-and-true web advertising techniques (CPM, CPC) and Facebook’s new “beacon” advertising concept to flop for a number of reasons. Facebook is cleaner but MySpace is a more solid business. MySpace doesn’t have to get innovative or fancy with their advertising options to haul in truckloads of ad revenues, but Facebook keeps bucking the trend and trying to create their own path. MySpace may be messy but they seem like the adult as far as running a business is concerned, and Facebook is still trying to get through business adolescence.