Show me the way to go home 24 June, 2004
I recently volunteered to help out a team at work that’s looking at a redesign of our homepage. As part of the brief, I’ve been looking at other university home pages to see if there are any useful standards we can benefit from, and to see what the competition’s doing. One interesting site I found is Napier in Edinburgh. Their home page is clear and I really like the different visitor-type graphics (e.g. undergraduate, postgraduate etc.); it’s definitely talking to a student audience, but without going over the top. Things change once you start to click around though.
I went to the Schools and Research Centres page and found myself unable to find an obvious link back to home. OK, it’s usually the logo. This page hasn’t even got a logo. What about that web address and phone number at top-left? Guess again. Ah, I see it now. It’s the little text graphic labelled ‘Home’, just below the green line. Nope that’s the research home page. Hmmm. Can you guess where home is?
See that little red triangle in the top-right. That’s it, or it’s supposed to be, but on this particular page it’s not working.
Yes, I could have clicked the Back button, and ordinarily I would have, if my browser (Firefox) hadn’t been greying the button out for some reason. But what about visitors that come to this page from a search engine? What would they have done?
Your home page is an important destination (that’s why there are so many arguments about it and why you put so much effort into it), give it the visibility it deserves with a clear link on every page.