I have started a very significant redesign of this site and it occured to me that my home page isn’t very useful. I am considering doing away with it.
The move away from standard blog templates, where the home page contains the last three to five posts, to a more magazine / news style means that often the home page doesn’t contain anything the visitor actually wants.
My current home page features an excerpt from the latest article, a category list, and a tabbed area to promote my tools, plugins and theme(s). So anyone who lands on my home page, and a lot of my visitors do, has to decide what they want to see, and click through, before they get any actual content.
On other blogs, blogs that are really just about articles and little else, I have a post on the home page; however, the SEO chappies are regularly telling us that duplicate content is a bad thing and from a visitor perspective it is better to have one article in one place so, at the very least, they don’t have to go one click further to add comments.
So, what I am considering is doing away with the home page altogether.
Obviously I still want people to use my nice easy base url, but I want to give them content straight away so my current solution is to style every single post page as a potential landing page, and use a 302 redirect from the home page to the most recent post.
If the user has arrived looking for something specific then they may read the article first, and they can still get to where they want. If they have arrived without knowing what they have in mind then they have content available instantly. No extra clicks.
So What do you think, good idea?
Do you think any other blogs suffer from the same problem, or if it just me? Can we do away with the home page altogether?
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Andrew Rickmann
Austin, I was reading a post by Matt Cutts earlier, albeit an old one, that suggested that the search engines usually show the results from the new page in the list, even though they know it is a temporary redirect. Besides that I don’t know what other effect it would have. I am more concerned with the experience than the rankings though.
Wpguy, It is possible that it would be confusing as the URL would change, but from a content perspective it isn’t much different to putting the content on the home page. A lot of websites redirect from the base URL so I think, though I am not positive, that most visitors wouldn’t be too phased by it.
I agree that my home page isn’t great, that is one reason why I am redesigning, but I don’t really like to spend time on a page that doesn’t really do too much expect add to the page views.
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wpGuy
Sounds interesting, but I think it can be confusing to new visitors… just a thought. Your home page looked a little confusing to me when I first visited your blog. I guess people expect to see the same old structure that 99% of the other blogs have. Cheers!
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Austin
That’s an interesting idea, but I wonder if it will dilute SEO. I see that if I google “Andrew Rickmann” the home page is in the top results, but what will happen once every time Google crawls your name, it ends up on a different page?