7.3.1 | Blogs

January 20, 2006 | Every page a homepage

By John Girard
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The failure to view every page as a homepage is one of the last hold-outs in the battle to reframe traditional publishers' thinking about what it means to be online.  Many magazine publishers, for instance, started with sites that looked a whole lot like the magazine (think flash intros = magazine covers; homepage = table of contents).

We've come a long way towards adapting to the new medium, but we're not there yet.

Today, publishers get as much as 30-50% of their site traffic from search, and when a user comes to a media site from search, they arrive at content pages rather than the homepage.  This is profoundly important: it may be the case that as many as half of your users don't come in the front door, don't experience the site the way that you have carefully planned for them to, but rather jump right to page 58 and start there.

This represents a significant opportunity for publishers who are willing to take it, and a significant problem for publishers who miss the boat.

What do we know about a reader who finds a content page on your site through search?

Most likely, they:

• Are interested in the subject of the content
• Would likely be interested in other pieces of content on the same subject
• May have an affinity for your brand
• May be interested in other pieces of content in the same general category or by the same author
  

This is a powerful bit of intelligence about a visitor you know nothing else about, and the way to leverage this intelligence is to make every content page a starting point for further exploration rather than an end point -- make every page a home page.

You know they are interested in a specific piece of content, so serve them up a list of related articles (disclaimer: I think this is critical not just because we sell software that does exactly this).  CNN, for example, does a good job of this (see the related box in the right well here for an example).

You know the user may have clicked through because they have an affinity for your brand (if you've titled your pages appropriately, it will be clear in the search result that they are coming to your site), so give them a list of the most popular content across your site (same disclaimer).  Smithsonian does a great job of this (see "Most Popular Links" in the right nav here).

You know the user may be interested in other content in the same category or by the same author -- so give them an easy way to find it (a good CMS will do this.  And we happen to sell one of those too).  Customer time.com provides a pretty good example of this (go to the time.com homepage here and click on any article, then see the "MORE BY AUTHOR" link in the article nav).

While we've got products that do all of these things, this isn't a piece written around the products -- just the opposite; the products have been designed around this idea.

In summary, the openness that's leading to more content being found by search is a good thing if you're prepared to harness it.  Make every page a homepage, and ride the wave, rather than fighting it.

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