Part of the process of designing a web site is to work out what goes where. And the logical place to start is the Home Page. Everybody has one. It’s compulsory. I was thinking about the Home Page for this site when I remembered an article by Keith Robinson (it’s worth following his links to previous articles to get the whole picture) discussing the notion of Home Pages and site navigation in general.

You have to have a Home Page, whether you want one or not, because it is the page that is displayed when someone enters your site, in my case http://www.midnightmuse.com.au into their browser. And on this site that turns up http://www.midnightmuse.com.au/index.php

It will always produce something like that, or index.html or default.html or something similar, unless there has been some sort of redirection going on.

Usability guru and non designer

href=”http://www.useit.com/”>Jakob Nielsen

is big on every page having a link to the home page. The article in Asterisk also mentions that most designers think a home page is a necessity. But I am not so sure.
Of course, there is the default or index page, but is that the entry point for most people? I think most users arrive at your site from a search engine, and that could land them anywhere.

The other point, and the one that got me thinking is those first two letters in a website address “ht”, as in http://whatever.com. They stand for hypertext and the whole point is that the web is multi-dimensional, as opposed to most printed material which has a starting point and a finishing point.

A look at your site’s statistics can be an illuminating exercise. Users don’t look at your site the way you intended them to. They go whereever they want. And the pages that you spent hours polishing are glanced at in seconds and discarded. It is a very humbling experience.

So, apart from being a default entry point, what purpose does the Home Page fulfill? Perhaps more people look at it than any other page, perhaps not. But just in case it makes sense to have some meaningful information there. But once a visitor has arrived does the Home Page have any higher priority than any other page?

I have a vague vision of a multi-dimensional hyper-Riemannian super-sphere where each page occupies a central position and all the other pages radiate from it, with no page carrying more weight than any other. This may be impossible, it may have already been done. Or it may be completely useless. But designing web sites with linear navigation doesn’t seem quite right to me. Users certainly don’t think so.