There is a flip side to accessibility... one that makes creating a solid website difficult. It's easier to establish a consistent, clear, and well-organized message in linear media like books and magazines. Maintaining a well-organized message across a website, on the other hand, is extremely challenging. While we like to think of a site's homepage as its cover, in reality any page can become a "homepage" in the sense that it may be a visitor's first impression, the first contact with your site... and your company!


Stop and think about your site. Consider the impression any random subpage would give if it were a visitor's first point of entry. Has the page been well-considered? Does it stand on its own merits? Does it have anything to say for itself? Examining the subpage, are there visual clues that the page is part of a larger story? Is it clear to the visitor where in the story they have happened onto? If the content of this page is part of a sequence, is the preceding or proceeding content clearly referenced? When this page stands alone, without the context of a preceding page, does it give a false impression? Does the page lead the visitor into other areas of the site which give the content context? When this page stands alone, does it comply with the site's overall marketing message?

The more pages your site has, the more interrelationships there are between subpages and the rest of the site. Maintaining consistent themes throughout dozens or even hundreds of pages is a huge challenge. But if the job is done well, each page can be part of a team that draws and leads visitors from tangential subjects into discovering your company's products or services, regardless of how "important" the individual page is to the overall site.


Depending on how many pages your site has, careful consideration of each perspective, inter-relationship, or possible tangential purpose may not be practical. Of course, by reviewing your site's traffic logs (or our Google tracking tools, if you have them installed on your site), you can easily review the pages that draw the most entry traffic and peg those which function, in a sense, as your site's homepage for that visit. The pages that get the most traffic should get the most attention in their function as the site's surrogate homepage.


When we are designing and developing a website, we work through our prototyping and design phases, starting with the homepage and working our way inward. Since we design the homepage first, and write copy for the homepage first, it's only natural that we that we get used to thinking about our sites from this logical, yet artificial, point of view. Yet in practice, many visitors will experience non-linear paths through the site, perhaps even missing the homepage altogether.

A healthy practice when designing and writing for the web is to pick a random subpage and to consider what a visitor's experience might be if it was the first page they saw. For a new site, this takes a bit of subjectivity and creativity. After a site has been online, you can actually see where these instances take place and study the resulting paths using search engine tracking tools. Not only that, but you can also see the actual phrase used that brought visitor to the site, as well as the particular page they landed on, and where they went from there. Observing the most popular instances and common trends is one way to fine tune a site's content, navigation, and organization.   next >