Homepage Real Estate Allocation

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, February 10, 2003

[fathom]

Some good tips for screen real estate for a web sites mainpage.

A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that's inside the site. However, these two goals accounted for only 39% of the screen space across a sample of 50 homepages.

A third important homepage goal is to tell users the site's purpose and where they are relative to the Web as a whole. Sites typically accomplish this using a logo and a tagline. On the sample sites, these elements were sometimes much too big, but on average, the sites spent an appropriate 5% on welcoming and situating the user. Even including these elements, however, the sample sites allocated less than half the screen space to useful pixels.

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Homepage Real Estate Allocation [useit.com]

[msgraph]

Thanks fathom! Sounds interesting and I'll have to give it a read.

[martinibuster]

Very good article. The only quibble I would have is the use of the "tagline" at the top of the page. Jakob advocates having a tagline for defining your site, etc.

But if you make that tagline work double-duty by tossing in a keyword for discrete phrase matching with the rest of the page content, what you have now is a Pumped Up Hard Working tag-line.

I agree with Jakob about companies wasting space on "welcome" text and other fluff. I call that kind of text "Lazy" because they don't produce.

I think of my text as employees, and as my employees I want them out there working. The less gold-brickers I have on my crew, the better. :)