How is your Shop Window?
Attitude Design has an interesting take on Home Pages and Shop Windows.
Retail shop windows carry massive lessons for home page designers. Take a high street fashion shop for example. The shop window will typically contain the following - the logo of the shop, some attractive graphics, some plastic models displaying a wide range of garments which are sold in the shop.
Now a website is slightly different but the ideas are the same. The logo will give the overall authority and brand recognition to the website as it does above a shop window.
It’s actually a good analogy. A good site homepage is a lot like a good store window. It gives you a glimpse of the content in a flattering light. Makes the viewer want to dig deeper, to go in and look around.
I’m currently working on a retail site, and I’m going to take this concept to heart. The initial design concept was very close to this idea anyway, but I’m going to step back and look at it again. Look at it as if it were a stone and mortar store, and see how the design holds up. I think it will do well, but this concept will let me further refine the design. Refinements that should directly relate to improved site statistics. What client can argue with that?