Home Page Evolution
I thought I would take a minute to reflect on how the home page of Practical eCommerce has changed over the years. With some help from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which archives websites as they existed in the past, I was able to take a look at how things had changed.
To start with, I think that it is important to understand that we as a company have also had some unique challenges in the last couple of years as a publishing company creating a printed magazine targeted at online business owners. That being said, let's take a look at some of the previous home pages that we have had.
The Beginning, Circa 2005
Initially, our website was designed to sell magazine subscriptions. As you can see, our home page in 2005 featured a large call to action for our visitors to subscribe to the printed magazine. At that time, our online presence was divided into two overall categories – free and premium content. Subscribers to our magazine had access to articles, tutorials and newsletters. The general public (non-subscribers) could only access the forum, directory and white papers sections of our site.
A tabbed navigation at the top that delineates the two categories was really all that we provided with regards to navigating through our website. On the right side we offered some small advertisements, a subscriber login and a newsletter signup form.
With regard to "above the fold" content, we really only had some article summaries. Since at the time our goal was to gain subscribers, our thought process there was that folks would reach our website, perhaps be intrigued by one of the articles, and click to find out more. Of course, when they clicked the article they would be presented with a login screen, and if they were not a subscriber they would be turned away. More importantly, search engines weren't really given an opportunity to peruse the site and index it to the fullest extent, and that is one of the reasons that we began to develop our next site.
Round Two, Circa 2006
For the next site that we released, we wanted to address some issues that we had noticed. Before examining the screenshot in too much detail, please note that the Wayback Machine sometimes does not grab images, and there should be a blue header at the top of the screenshot. That being said, let's move on to the improvements that we made.
One change that we addressed with this version of our website is that we wanted to open up more content to the public. It had become clear to us from the response to our magazine that our content was in demand, and that there was some value in simply letting it out there. So on this version of the home page, you might notice that we have articles listed that are free to the public, and then some that are for subscribers only.
In addition, we wanted to incorporate a search feature into the home page because we had received feedback that it was difficult for someone that was using our site as a resource to find information. Since we were opening up more of our articles to the public for free, it seemed that the search options on the right side of the screen were imperative.
Worth mentioning as well are the fact that at this time we are still primarily trying to increase our print magazine subscriber base, so the heavy subscription call to action is still present. However, to make room for more useful content we subverted the subscriber login to the top of the page where it takes up less space.
Clearly we were on to something here, as nearly every aspect of our sites performance improved. However, there were changes on the horizon that (in my opinion) our publisher, Kerry Murdock, was very smart to anticipate early and act upon. Not only did Kerry have a feeling about the direction of print advertising, but also of content distribution on the Internet in general. Not surprisingly, we were working on a new version of our website in order to accommodate these changes.
The Advertising Era, Circa 2007
Once again, we needed to make some changes in order to adjust to the feedback that we were receiving, and also to improve the user experience for visitors to our website. As with the last screenshot, the header images are not shown, but at the top was our logo on the left and a banner ad on the right. I fondly nicknamed this iteration of our home page "the advertising one", because it was the first layout of our site where we took online advertising into account when we were designing it. Since the people that our content appeals to tended to spend more time online than they did looking at a print magazine, and also because the trend was moving towards online content, we responded in two ways – we offered more advertising on our website and we opened up all of our content to the public.
While we still offered a printed magazine, we had slowed the production of our printed piece down to once every two months, rather than once a month. This decision was made for many reasons, including so that we could provide higher quality content, focus more on our online presence and also because print advertising for our target market was not exactly expanding. As you can see, the call to action for subscribing the magazine has been subverted to the right side of the screen. Our business model was changing, and we needed the space for other things.
Our primary concern here was offering the content that our visitors were looking for. All of our content was now free, and this re-design of the site concentrated on navigation. For the first time, we moved away from a tabbed navigation at the top and instead went with a vertical navigation down the left side. We created an enhanced search feature, implemented RSS and Atom feeds, and spent much of our efforts concentrating on creating a user experience and community feel to our site.
Which Leads Us To Today
Our most recent version of our website, released earlier this year, concentrates on simplification and content. Once again our business model changed again as we faced more and more challenges with our printed magazine. In the end, we decided to stop printing Practical eCommerce Magazine and instead went about putting all of our efforts into our online presence.
Of course, this meant that we needed to take advertising into consideration when we were making the changes that we made. The primary thing that we did with regard to advertising was to adopt the standard IAB advertising sizes for online ads, and to concentrate more on making sure that the advertising was not too intrusive or overwhelming. Not only that, but we have expanded our advertising offerings to newsletter ads and (recently) text-based ads.
The rest of the site re-design mainly focused on functionality and usability. We opted to strip everything out of our site that wasn't being used aggressively by our visitors. Rather than having more than one password for various parts of our site, we brought everything under one user account that allows our visitors to have a more seamless experience at our site. In addition, we added quite a bit of features that allow our users to purchase directory listings and job postings, as well as adding lots of Ajax magic throughout the site to make certain parts of the site easier to use.
We also returned to the tabbed navigation at the top of the site, which allows our visitors to easily get a birds-eye view of what types of information we offer. In addition to tabbed navigation, we implemented a tagging system to help our visitors find content easier. Visitors can now find related content easily by clicking on a tag in our tag cloud. Along those same lines, we spent quite a bit of time focusing on our search feature, which with this version of the site provides much more comprehensive search results.
Conclusions
I mentioned this earlier, but one thing that is interesting with regard to our online presence is that it's changes reflect not only our improvements in our home page, but also changes in our business model over time. As a publishing company and content distributors, we have had an interesting set of challenges that we have had to face over that past few years, particularly in the face of a decline in print advertising (for our target market) and also in keeping up with changes on the web.
I think one conclusion that can be drawn here, based on looking at our screenshots, is that like most informational websites the changes to our home page have all resulted in a higher content density. In other words, as time has passed we have tried to fit more content into the "above the fold" area of our home page without leaving the site cluttered and difficult to view.
If I have learned anything from my experience with Practical eCommerce, other than the importance of forward thinking, it is that we will always be changing. It is a very common expression among the PeC staff that we all hope we will continue to improve, adjust and react to changes in our business and to the demands from our visitors. After all, why wouldn't we?
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: design, site evolution, content density.
