The result? Design indigestion.
Web designers, information architects, and marketing leaders need to carefully select
which flavors the audience will receive. Some pieces, like the navigation, are imperative.
Others, like a list of press releases, could be easily argued both ways. Let??™s examine the different
pieces that could manifest in the final design.
Critical elements
Some homepage elements are simply necessary. Years of conditioning from the global web
community have deemed them standards, and people expect certain things to be in certain
places. This is a result of design evolution. Worldwide usability has been subjected to
millions of iterations and slowly distilled down to a few basic guidelines applicable to any
business.
Navigation
If every website is a town, the navigation serves as the roadmap for finding your way
around the community. Very few are alike; every business is different, and every designer
prefers different ways of organizing a site??™s links. The result is a widely incongruent collection
of directions that vary in clarity, depth, and design.
THE HOMEPAGE
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It is precisely because of this disparity that the navigation should be present on the homepage,
and should be the same navigation that appears on internal pages.
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