Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

With any luck, you clicked the itty bitty little text link from the brand spankin' new home page to find this latest missive. I say that only because I'm writing a wee bit in advance of the theoretical deployment of said home page. I have the utmost confidence that by Tuesday (today, right?) you will in fact, be seeing the new one.

Hopefully you like it. Maybe you even want to say how much you like it in the comments section of this blog. That's your call... All I'm sayin' is... feel free.

Like most redesigns, the new homepage is trying to do what the old homepage did, only better. It's cleaner, brighter, and goes for a different organizational structure. The whole "personal" "business" and "enterprise" funnel is something new we're trying. Kind of a "what do you want to host today" feel, instead of relying on people to know exactly what shared, VPS, and dedicated servers are. I know what they are, but I've been at this for a while, so I'm basically cheating.

The real estate devoted to a link to this very blog has been greatly reduced. No longer does one have to click on the sizable image of a barefoot, curly haired individual to find this bi-weekly collection of roughly 1000 words. To be honest, the original image was there from the start as a bit of an accent, it was simply drafted later to become the blog link. It was a link of convenience, and I'm not broken up about losing it. I never really liked that guy in the first place. Suffice to say, I don't look anything like him, and I wear shoes.

Cheap, old shoes... but shoes nonetheless.

Homepages

With any luck, this section will look something like advice.

A homepage is usually the "first impression" anyone is going to get of your website. Granted, there are certainly cases where this might not be the case, such as getting search engine traffic to a specific product page via a search for that product. More likely than not, even in those situations, the visitor might check out the homepage before making a decision on whether to buy said product. Most people are going to start at the homepage and, this is the important part, either go deeper or leave.

You probably didn't put up that homepage or all those other pages below it for them to leave, so it's in your best interest if they hang around a while and click some stuff. Everyone has opinions on the best way to achieve this result, and guess I'm about to tell you a few of mine. Don't confuse these opinions with verifiable facts. You might like them or you might not. If you don't, there's a wealth of alternatives out there.

Integration. By which, I mean, does the homepage have to look exactly like the rest of the pages? Yes, but you have some flexibility. I've heard the homepages described as something akin to a magazine cover, and that's a good analogy. The cover of a magazine is a unique entity, but it should provide a kind of creative continuity between it and the interior pages. Like the cover of a magazine, your homepage is supposed to capture the interest of the viewer and have them "open it up" by going deeper inside.

Thinking of a homepage as a magazine cover gives you a good place to start, but it's not everything. You may, perhaps, have noticed some slight differences between the cover of say... "The Economist", and... for instance.... "Teen Beat." The people running these magazines know they have different audiences, and its important for you to know your audience as well in terms of design, both inside and outside.

I'm sure there exists someone who reads both "The Economist" and "Teen Beat" with avid regularity, but this individual is probably a rarity. Economist readers and Teen Beat readers expect two different things from their chosen literary material. You will need to have some idea of what your target audience expects in order to hold their interest and get them clicking deeper.

Start with the basics, namely- the people who're already targeting your planned audience. Looking at the competition is always useful, especially if you think your audience is going to be fairly broad. If your online store is selling general items or your website has very broad information, then you probably have a wealth of valid design options. In cases like these, gambling on "separating from the pack" might not be such a bad idea. Websites with a limited, "niche" appeal may not wish to be so bold. There's a reason "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a popular phrase.

Preservation. What to keep the same on your standout, glossy homepage? The core navigational elements always need to have some similarity. Even if they're in a different location on the homepage, keep the style similar in terms of fonts and general format. Color continuity is also important. Continuity can easily be maintained between varied layouts with the use of a set color scheme. Picking the color scheme is again matter of taste and target audience.

Graphic elements can also help maintain continuity. Your logo or, in the absence thereof, a site name graphic, can provide a good visual anchor, as it will not change. Employ the same style of imagery throughout, not simply as relates to the types of photos or art used, but elements (if applicable) like borders, shadows, rules and other graphical accents.

Having a good stock photo resource can be a boon in this respect. Find one with advanced search capabilities that include colors and/or image collections. Confine yourself to images with certain colors (that match your chosen color scheme) or images within certain collections and you'll go far in preserving your visual continuity.

None of this should be ground breaking by any means. It wasn't meant to be anything more than a broad sweep to get you thinking about that which might not have immediately occurred to you when embarking on a new website design. I think of myself as fairly "mainstream" in design, whatever that means, yet also reasonably pragmatic. I've never met an animated gif or background MIDI I didn't hate, but if I was paid a lot (A LOT) of money by a teenage girl to build a website for her, I might liberally use both, just to cash the check.