Approximately 90% of the time people spend at your website is not on the homepage!
Category: current-news | Author: James Breeze | Date: 04/05/2006
How many times have you or your clients had arguments about your business unit's positioning on the homepage? Spent money testing and retesting homepage concepts? Or tweaking the graphics to get it just right for that 'so and so' upstairs? Well it's time to use some economic theory to sort it out once and for all!
Over lunch this week a friend of mine introduced me to the concept of 'The Long Tail' which can be used to describe the success of Amazon and other mega online stores. They make much of their money out of the 'stuff no one wants' - the long tail on the hyperbolic distribution curve . There is so much more stuff than the few best sellers and because Amazon has such a fantastic storage, reach and distribution mechanism it is easy to leverage sales out of stuff.
That same day I saw also the article Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach, by Joshua Porter, about the long tail applied to user interface design. If you spend all your time and money on the homepage of a website your missing out on the places where the highest proportion of all the traffic really actually goes! In banking that's the transaction process where the deal is clinched, not where the customer lands first!
Check it out.
