We already know we're welcome. Now get to the point.

One of the cardinal sins of building web sites is falling prey to the temptation to blather about... well... just about everything.

The earliest transgressions of this behavior were typified by companies feeling it necessary to welcome you to their home page.

"Welcome to the home page of blah blah blah, a blah blah company that specializes in blah... blah... zzzzzzzzzzz"

But when we reflect that, on average, 60% of your traffic comes to your site through pages other than your home page, the importance of that welcome message to communicate your "brand voice" is reduced significantly, and you must instead communicate by relying on a model of organization that will allow users to orient themselves and discover whatever drove them to your site in the first place.

(Note: I imagine the variance for the above statistic is pretty large, depending on who you are. Consider that according to John's post the other day, only 3.6582% of Wikipedia's visitors hit the home page. For reference, the 60% statistic is pulled directly from Nielsen's Prioritizing Web Usability, pp. 28-29, and speaks directly of his measurements.)

Text serves a useful purpose on most pages in just about every site, but some require less than others. Say what you need to say, but don't clutter up the page with puffery and superfluous words that mean more to you than they do to the user.

I haven't read it yet, but I hear this is a pretty good book on the subject. - Cam Beck

Comments

[Valeria Maltoni]

Say why I should care, show me what you've got to respond to my interest, tell/show me how. Do it with stories, it works better. Simple language, concrete material, etc. Working on all of that, one page at a time ;-)

[mvellandi]

Ha! Reduce the 'happy talk' and be objective. Let everything speak for itself. Reduce clutter through strict copy chopping.
All reminiscent from Steve's book...

[Roger von Oech]

Good pointers.

"I haven't read it yet, but I hear this is a pretty good book on the subject."

Along those lines (and I don't always practice it), but in my web writing I try to limit my paragraphs to no more than three sentences (in my books, paragraphs can run much longer).

[Cam Beck]

Valeria - You said it!

Mario - Don't hold me to it, but I think Steve Krug wrote the intro for the book I mentioned. I just ordered it off of Amazon, so hopefully it will be here soon.

Roger - Some of my early problems with writing online was my tendency to be verbose. I'm not saying I've conquered the problem, but I'm constantly working on it. :)

[Guerrillero]

I haven't thought about this as explained here. it is really so: the home page serves to nothing - just bla bla...

[Lisa Braithwaite]

This goes for public speaking as well! When you clutter up the opening of your presentation with "Welcome to my fabulous talk. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be speaking before your distinguished group. Blah blah blah. . ." you've already lost your audience.

Get to the point - make an impact right from the beginning.

[Cam Beck]

Lisa - I hadn't considered that... but you're right. Thank you so much for the contribution.

Guerrillero - I wouldn't call the home page useless... It can serve a very important function (particularly in allowing users to orient themselves), but "welcoming" users to the site isn't one of them.

They're there. They want something.
1. Let them know they're at the right place (if they are - your persistent header/logo/tagline should accomplish this).

2. Show them what can be DONE on the site. This can partially be handled by navigation and is not necessarily limited to the home page, but most importantly,

3. Show them what they should START. The homepage can be used primarily for this purpose, as interior pages can jump people into the middle of something.