10 Most Violated Home Page Guidelines

November 10, 2003

Although I have sort of a love hate relationship with Jakob Nielsen (some of his views on graphics on sites and navigation are just a little too extreme), he does have some very valid points when it comes to general page layout and home page design.

The man I love to hate (pop-up) recently published his top 10 list of most violated home page design standards. Jakob found the that many of the items listed had a very low percentage of being used on the web.

Here are some key examples:

• Emphasize what your site offers that's of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors . Compliance Rate: 27%
• Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size. Compliance Rate: 28%
• Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage. Compliance Rate: 41%
• Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does. Compliance Rate: 36%

Some of these things are just plain obvious. For example, you would want to explain what your site is all about and the value to the user. However, what I find in my many design and content sessions is that despite the desire explain the value of the site to your users, the message gets muddled in marketing speak that means nothing to the extenal audience.

Another compliance item that drives me crazy is the embedding of a link to the home page while you are on the home page. We have examples of this phenomena on some of the sites we have online where I work. A lot of those are just legacy items or cases where the it was too much effort to conditionally write the link depending where the user was in the site.

If you are on the home page, whether the Global Home or a localized country home, you should not be able to revisit the page you are already on by clicking home. You are already home.

So, having a home link on the home page confuses users. Hell, it can confuse me at times and I design navigation systems for a living.

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