Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

The Top Four Plausible Excuses for not Spelling Out the Big Picture on
the Home Page

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But...the Home page? Really?
I know what some of you are thinking:
“Nobody enters a site through the Home page anymore. That’s so 2004.”
And you’re right, of course. Compared to the early days of the Web, the
Home page has lost its preeminence. Now people are just as likely—or more
likely—to enter your site by clicking on a link in an email, a blog, or
something from a social network that takes them directly to a page deep in
your site.
Because of this, every page of your site should do as much as it can to orient
them properly: to give them the right idea about who you are, what you do,
and what your site has to offer.
The problem is, though, there’s not much space on most pages to do that
well. As a result, many users have formed a new behavior.
People will teleport into the depths of a site and look at the page the link
took them to. Very often, though, the next thing they’ll do is visit the Home
page to get their bearings. (I like to think of it as divers bobbing up to the

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surface to see where they are.) If the page they went to was interesting, they
want to see what else is on the site. If it contained information they need to
rely on, they may want to find out who publishes it, and how credible it is.
The Home page is still the place where this happens, and you need to do it
well.
How to get the message across
Everything on the Home page can contribute to our understanding of what
the site is. But there are three important places on the page where we expect
to find explicit statements of what the site is about.
The tagline.
One of the most valuable bits of real estate is the space
right next to the Site ID. When we see a phrase that’s visually
connected to the ID, we know it’s meant to be a tagline, and so we read
it as a description of the whole site. We’ll look at taglines in detail in
the next section.