Not Always the Homepage

During a pitch meeting last week, the client who we were pitching for was shocked that not everyone who arrives to their websites comes via the homepage. We tried to explain that this is because users are either directed to pages from search engines or dedicated landing pages which are designed for specific purposes. She just didn’t believe us.

So afterward the meeting we did some analysis of websites we’ve built recently in Google Analytics and the writing was on the wall. The majority of websites we’ve built the users arrive via a search query in a search engine and they arrived directly to the relevant page of the site. Others arrived by direct links in advertising, widgets, email newsletters, RSS feeds and directly from websites which linked to them.

So what does this mean? Well from a design perspective it means that no matter where the user arrives they need to be able to navigate to other parts of the site easily, either by navigation or by search. Sure a user may visit the homepage of the site during their visit, but it means that you need to communicate effectively on every page and not just the homepage. This also means that users need to be able to sign up to the site or newsletters from all pages.

Our design team is highly skilled at understanding the target audience and how to help navigate them to the right location on your site. If you’re unhappy with your current design and feel you need to provide users a better user experience, then please contact us and we’ll help you through our process.