This month we’d like to welcome back Donna (Maurer) Spencer.  We last interviewed her nearly a year ago, on card sorting. Today she is talking about link-rich home pages, a subject that is near and dear to my heart.
 
I recently had a conversation with a manager of a large government website. He boasted about the recent changes to the department home page.  He was particularly proud of one of his developments. "I reduced the number of links from 67 to 17", he told me.
 
My eyebrows shot up and I just managed to stop myself gasping in surprise.  Regaining my composure, I calmly asked him, "Oh, really. How did that work out?"
 
"It’s much better," he said.  "Now people only have to choose from the 8 main categories on the home page" (the other 9 links were footer links and site utilities).
 
I walked away knowing that this manager had no real idea whether the changes worked and with a strong feeling that they probably hadn’t.
 
Believe it or not, link-rich home pages (ones where you have a lot of links) are OK.  They might even be a really good option, especially for large websites with a wide variety of content.  Let me explain why.
 
Whenever we combine content into groups and decide on a label, we are creating a category. On large websites with varied content, creating a small number of categories that represent all the content is extremely difficult.  That’s because as we create fewer and fewer categories, the labels get more and more abstract. The labels chosen may mean something to the developers, or the staff of that organisation, but will the customers understand?  How will the customers know how to find the information they want?
 
That’s where link-rich homepages can help. Instead of using just broad categories as the entry point to a site - we can use broad categories plus detailed links. Take a look at the MAF website in New Zealand for an example.
 
An example I’ve worked on recently was for a big government department in Australia. The old home page navigation had a left-hand navigation bar with 8 main categories. The new approach still uses the left-hand navigation bar, but the body of the page has the category name plus links to sub-topics and relevant external websites. The addition of key links helps explain what the each category is about, and allows people to jump directly to a topic of interest (and they do - when the new version was released, traffic to the topics pages increased).
 
A word of caution is necessary, however.  Effective link-rich home pages don’t just happen.  Too many links can be confusing and hard to navigate.  There is a lot on the page, so you need to take special care to:
 

• Cluster links into groups that make sense to the reader - or people will still not know where to start.
• Place a lot of attention on good visual design - use plenty of whitespace, good alignment and good line height. Otherwise the groups of links will not be readable.
• Avoid using other attention-grabbing devices such as banner ads and anything that moves - the visual load will be too high.

The final challenge with link-rich pages is that everyone will tell you that you are wrong - the common perception is that less is better. The best way to overcome this is to undertake usability testing. But don’t just test the link-rich page. Test an alternative version with a more traditional small set of categories. That way you’ll know that your link-rich version works, and you’ll be able to show that it is better than the alternative.
 
Want to know more? Hear Donna rave about the advantages of link-rich home pages and much more IA goodness at our workshop on the 21st of August in Wellington.