One of my students presented last week on New Scientist’s website. It’s not one I’d visited before but I was impressed with the clean, attractive home page design (it’s apparently a recent redesign).
The trend for a long time has been for the home page to be taken up with large image panels, often dynamically rotating. While these look attractive, I’ve never been a huge fan of their functionality – my experience is that they don’t get as many clicks as your prime real estate should. This site offers an alternative to the image panel theme, although some might argue that it fails in not having one dominant story. In my opinion, it’s simple and it works. I don’t get lost on the page.
Another site that recently had a redesign is glamour.com (as well as a domain shift – it used to be that glamour.com went to French Glamour). They’ve retained the rotating images but made them much smaller than on most sites, and given up a major part of the home page to links to their blogs – a great idea if you have lots of blogs as your home page is constantly being updated, which is good for return visitors as well as Google. I do think, though, that their site header takes up far too much space – I don’t get to any content until halfway down my window (I’m on a 1280 x 800 monitor).
What do you think of these sites? What are your favourite magazine website home pages?
Electronic split-runs... they're not the only site that does that, and I've noticed on these sites a high number of Westjet ads, actually - do they think that Canadians reading foreign/US sites are more likely to travel? (They're probably right.) I don't think it's worth pursuing if you have relatively low traffic but for bigger sites, it's worth looking at - best though probably to partner with an American site and trade ad sales, as it would take a lot of resources for your sales team to have to sell outside our borders. Of course, I'm no sales expert - would love to have someone from online sales weigh in on this.