Home Page Design

Non-Mainstream

My first 5 second test was done on a non-mainstream site called Prison Planet.com

• At first review the site has its logo and slogan across the top banner.
• It has access to all its newest news and content on the home page along with books & DVD’s that are for sale.
• The Navigation has a link to the Home page to access from anywhere within the site. There is also links to archived material, shopping cart, search, and many other easily accessible links on the Home page.

I don’t believe this site needs to do anything to improve its business needs, I believe they have everything in place to meet its costumer needs.

Successful Website Home Page

NASCAR.com
Nascar.com Home Page I feel is a success because the continue to update the Home page several times a day to keep race fans up to date with everything that is going on in stock car racing. The site has the logo at top left corner of page along with Navigation accessing all relevant content across the top of page. There is search box at the top right corner along with the sign in link and sign up link, there is also easy access to the navigation link to Nascar store for customers to purchase racing items.
The one negative I see on this site is the excessive advertisements that users must tend with before being able to view videos.

YOUTUBE.com
YouTube has their logo displayed at the top left corner of the site along with a search box that it’s right next to the logo for easy searching of content/videos. They also have very simple and easily accessible Navigation links to get to the content you are looking for and to get you back to the home page. There is a create account and sign-in at the top right of the home page along with an upload button to quickly get your videos uploaded to YouTube. They also have videos of the most watched, videos being currently viewed and most popular videos on the home page.

YouTube has done a great job with their site making it simple and easy to use for the consumer. It is laid out very well making videos easy to find, watch and upload.

Unsuccessful Website Home Page

Drudge Report
At first sight this is a very ugly site. The Home page is a 3 column page field with a ton of links to outside stories and resources with no way to get back to the home page without using your back button or typing the link back in your browser when clicking a link. The contact information for the site is at the bottom right of page with the same font on look of the rest of the site. It blends in with everything else.
The first thing that I would do, would to be; give the site some color and some styling and a logo so that it would be a little more pleasant to the eyes. Then break the stories and news into categories. I would make Navigation links for the categories then create pages for them with brief description of the stories or news then link it to the source the news is coming from. I would also be sure that the link would open in a new window so that users could get back to the site Home Page easily. I would only put the newest and late breaking news in the body of the home page and archive the older news on the site. With some better organization of all the news links and some styling the owner of this site might actually get some quality advertisements on there along with user that would stick around to use the site.

FixedEarth
It took me some time to find a Home Page I thought was ugly enough to use and I finally ran across this one using a google search.  The Home Page is entirely to long and makes me not even want to bother reading any of it or even seeing what the site is even about. This site needs some styling done to improve the layout of the site. The sections with the tan background could actually be made into a Navigation link to a newly created page for that topic, so that it would reduce the size/length of the Home page. The subject area menu at the bottom could be made into its own link named Resources and then have all those links listed on that page.