Part of my job involves recruiting material for our homepage to keep it fresh and timely, working with staff to develop Web-ready articles and appropriate graphic elements, and getting the “products” to Faye for posting. Paul (my supervisor) and Holly (my ally and sounding board) collaborate on this venture.
So, what makes a good homepage feature?
First and foremost, it should exemplify clean, easy-to-understand prose that people find interesting to read, that delivers on the promise of its title and opening lines, and that shows awareness of and respect for readers’ needs.
The homepage itself doesn’t have a specific, carefully targeted audience. Its audience includes anyone who comes to the page. Ideally, writers should use links to direct various reader groups to related materials that might interest them.
Because Internet users experience Web pages as places they go to, travel around in, and leave, writers should work to create a special ambiance that connects to New Hampshire people and piques the interest of anyone who drops in for a visit. Even if they just cruise in and out without reading anything all the way through, or don’t have an interest in the specific topics, site visitors should leave thinking, “Hey, I want to come back here soon.”
Writing for the Web allows you to write a little and point to a lot. The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to vast realms of territory, letting readers themselves make their own travel plans.
Links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide nuanced or highly technical detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Research shows that professionals/experts enhance their credibility on the Web as much by what they point to as by what they themselves write.
The Web uniquely empowers all users to respond, publish, comment, review, critique, and add their own ideas, as well as to build both ad hoc and enduring communities of discourse, planning, research and action. This capability approaches the ideal of engagement the Kellogg Foundation has suggested as the key to survival of the land-grant universities and the cooperative extension system associated with them: two-way, even multi-party communication to which each party brings knowledge, skill and experience and in which each individual participates as both learner and teacher.
Done well, our homepage can serve our visitors’ needs for timely information, while simultaneously serving other purposes. Some of these include:
Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.
Posted by pboyles at June 22, 2006 9:49 AM