Homepage vs. Product Page

Should you spend more time designing your homepage or does your product page deserve extra time spent perfecting it? Most people are going to answer the homepage without giving it any thought, why would you do it any other way. A new article from A List Apart suggests designing what Derek Powazek calls the atomic element first and the homepage afterward.

This is the atomic element—for a news site, it’s the story page; for a search engine, it’s the search result; for a store, it’s a product page. This page accounts for 60 to 75 percent of all page views on the site. The rest belong to the home page.

Derek provides four very good reasons why it’s a good idea - I’d have to say I agree with them all. In the past I’ve approached site design from the homepage, but with what we can learn looking at your site analytics this makes complete sense. This is what surprised me about the article, Derek never mentions that many of your site visitors won’t enter your site through the homepage. He does mention that 60-75% of your traffic will be to the atomic elements. After all those pages do contain the information most people will be coming to your site to see in the first place.

Most search engine traffic will lead new visitors to the pages of your site that are, in fact, the atomic elements. The first impression most visitors will have of your company and its products is the presentation of these pages. How do your product pages compare to your homepage? Do you find that you make changes more often to your homepage or your atomic element pages? Ask your IT department for a site traffic report and look at which pages people are entering your site through.

Now take a look at those pages, do they present the image of your company you want them to?