How Not to Design a Home Page • Hacker News Board

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#11

Post by T-hawk » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

The content classifications are arguable. The main headline is about a movie, which is a million-dollar investment and business; and it's Friday, peak day when moviegoing and news consumption overlap. I think it'd be quite reasonable to count that as business news. The distinction between navigation and business news can also be fuzzy; it's not clear why the bottom-left links to headlines count as navigation but the bottom-center links count as content. Finally, everything below the fold is ignored, where the proportion of content does improve. (Above-the-foldness is relevant but not the entire story.)

The classifying was obviously done with an agenda in mind to push this story; take it with a grain of salt. (Don't get me wrong, the page is indeed still content-light and fluff-heavy, but to cite 99.5% is misleading.)

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#12

Post by tmarthal » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 8:35 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #10

rhizome wrote: post #4

Measuring generously, 284×22 are devoted to news. That’s half a percent for content, 99.5% other stuff. Alas, it's not such a mystery if you read that as "99.5% profit."

These are not independent variables though. People won't visit your site just to see the ads (milliondollarwebpage notwithstanding). In order for your ads to generate revenue you need content that people want to see. And you need people to revisit your site often. If you just cram a lot of ads into a page you'll increase revenues for a little while, then your readership goes away and then your cpm rates go way down.…

... and the idea is that there are advertisements which generate revenue on the second, third and fourth page in the site that they visit. So his 99.5% metric is that 60% or so of that screen is trying to drive traffic to other articles on the site.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#13

Post by glassx » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 8:57 PM UTC

Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone:

http://imgur.com/QVpwz

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#14

Post by Terretta » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 9:07 PM UTC

glassx wrote: post #13

Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone: http://imgur.com/QVpwz

The web as the gods — or at least Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen — intended! That content would even render and navigate nicely in Lynx.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#15

Post by rhizome » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

tmarthal wrote: post #12

InclinedPlane wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not independent variables though. People won't visit your site just to see the ads (milliondollarwebpage notwithstanding). In order for your ads to generate revenue you need content that people want to see. And you need people to revisit your site often. If you just cram a lot of ads into a page you'll increase revenues for a little while, then your readership goes away and then your cpm rates go way down.…

... and the idea is that there are advertisements which generate revenue on the second, third and fourth page in the site that they visit. So his 99.5% metric is that 60% or so of that screen is trying to drive traffic to other articles on the site.

Hmm, not sure I'm following you here.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#16

Post by wanorris » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 9:15 PM UTC

MJR wrote: post #9

This is a bizjournals.com site - They run 41 of these city specific business journal sites as online companions to a weekly print edition of the journal. There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

> There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that this is not in disagreement with the author's point.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#17

Post by dylangs1030 » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:11 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #5

I'm always shocked when I see screenshots with ads on webpages, with adblock plus, I've basically forgotten that's what the web looks like to a lot of people. I can't imagine using the web without adblock.

Same here. Whenever I go on news websites, I find the stark white spaces that would otherwise be noisy, "loud" ads is much more comforting.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#18

Post by Semiapies » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:14 PM UTC

glassx wrote: post #13

Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone: http://imgur.com/QVpwz

It'd be far from the first site with a much more usable mobile version.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#19

Post by tmarthal » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:15 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #15

tmarthal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and the idea is that there are advertisements which generate revenue on the second, third and fourth page in the site that they visit. So his 99.5% metric is that 60% or so of that screen is trying to drive traffic to other articles on the site.

Hmm, not sure I'm following you here.

What I was trying to connote is that 60%+ of that home page was devoted to driving traffic to other stories in the same site.

A publisher's home page shouldn't necessarily be a place for content (even though it is serving ads). A page's home page is to drive traffic to articles in the site (that _also_ serve ads); this is the 60% navigation and "Non-business Related Filler" that the article talks about.

Re: How Not to Design a Home Page

#20

Post by kstenerud » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

Could someone please explain what, exactly, is wrong with that page? I mean, other than the fact that it's full of ads.

Edit: This is not a troll post. I really don't see anything wrong with that site, but apparently lots of other people do.