Colleagues,
If you don't know Rob Norton's free weekly newsletter
on Web design and editorial development, you should.
If you have a Web site, if your school or department
has a Web site, this letter will help you improve the quality
of your site, attract, and hold readers, and win repeat
visits.
Highly recommended!
Ken Friedman
--
Net Style - by Rob Norton
The free weekly newsletter about web writing, editing and design.
''SELL'' CONTENT ON THE HOME PAGE
Cruise the Web and you'll conclude that most websites don't
really know what their home page is supposed to do. Since
it is the first thing a potential reader sees, nothing is
more important for the success of a website that a well-
executed home page. After all, as St. Jerome noted nearly
2,000 years ago, "Early impressions are hard to eradicate
from the mind." On the Web, if you make a bad first
impression, it may well be the last impression you get to
make on a particular visitor.
Web designers can learn a lot from magazine designers about
home page-design. For most websites, the home page should
function much like the cover of a glossy magazine. Properly
executed, a magazine cover serves two primary functions:
First it makes you want to buy the magazine (or pick it up
if you're already a subscriber), and then is makes you want
to read the content that's inside.
Let's deconstruct the cover of the October issue of
''Talk,'' the US glossy monthly (viewable at http://www.
talkmagazine.com/talkmedia/october2001/index2.html). The
most important recurring feature of a magazine cover is the
logo. The Talk logo is prominent, well set off from the
background, and in the right place: at the top of the cover,
where it can't be missed. The logo of a website (sometimes
called the ''masthead'') should have these same attributes,
though it must be smaller, given the smaller size and limited
amount of the home page that's viewable on a browser.
Most magazine's will feature a single ''cover story'' as their
main ''sell'' (to use magazine lingo). Talk's is a profile of
an American TV starlet. Here, the magazine's designers have
committed an unpardonable sin: They've put the headline for
the story--''You Know You Like To Watch''--at the bottom of
the page, where a reader's eye does not naturally go, and
where the headline will be invisible to someone looking at the
magazine in a newsstand rack, which normally obscures the
bottom half (or more) of the cover. The main headline should
always be high on the page, and either as prominent or more
prominent than the logo. Web designers should highlight the
most important single piece of content in the same way, and
make sure that it will be visible--without scrolling--in a
typical browser window.
THE SUBSIDIARY SELLS
Look again at the Talk cover, and you'll see that four other
stories inside the magazine (the subsidiary sells) are
highlighted prominently along the left side of the cover--one
on singer Mariah Carey, one on former US Attorney General
Janet Reno, one about a Scientologist and one about a
"tabloid hit man." Below these, two additional stories are mentioned.
At the bottom of the page, below the main headline,
three more articles are featured as well.
All told, that makes 10 articles featured on the cover, giving
the potential reader 10 different reasons to buy the magazine,
or to open it and begin browsing. Someone uninterested in TV starlets,
for instance--and thus not interested in the main
cover story--might nevertheless be intrigued by any one of the
other nine sells.
A website's home page should work the same way. Indeed, it has
one advantage over the magazine cover: since ''sells' on a web
page should all be hyperlinks, potential readers don't need
to do anything as clumsy as leafing through a magazine. All
they have to do is click. Once they've done that, the page
designer has accomplished what should always be the ultimate
goal: turning potential readers into actual readers.
The web designer should not attempt to use one of the other
tools of the magazine designer--the big, bold, photo. Glossy
magazine covers are a terrific medium for lavish visual
display; the web page is not. If you include a huge picture
on your home page it will make your page slow to download for
all readers--and excruciatingly slow for readers who access
the Web with dial-up modems.
One of the worst sins of home page design is to use a
''welcome'' page that features little but a graphic or
animation and a ''click-to-enter'' link. (Worst of all is the
Flash animation that takes many seconds to download and play.)
Your readers have gone to the trouble of clicking a link to
your site or perhaps even typing your URL into their browser.
The last thing you should do is to greet them with a barrier
to your content. Back to the magazine-cover metaphor, it's as
though a magazine designer, after creating an elegant,
content rich the cover, arranged to have the magazine
delivered in a plain envelope that says, "open this to see
magazine."
--by Rob Norton, September 26, 2001
Net Style is published every Wednesday.
Rob Norton is a freelance writer,
editor and consultant, and former executive
editor of FORTUNE magazine.
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