The Design of Sites: Pattern Group C — Creating a Powerful Homepage
Pattern Group C of The Design of Sites. Documents two patterns in full six-part format (background/problem/forces/solution/other-patterns, per Web Design Patterns): Homepage Portal (C1) and Up-Front Value Proposition (C2).
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Homepage Portal (C1) frames the homepage as the site’s single highest-leverage page — seen far more often than any other — and lays out the competing demands (brand, look-and-feel, content, personalization, navigation clarity, download speed) it has to satisfy at once within the limited space above the fold.
- A recurring rule of thumb: dedicate roughly 95% of Above the Fold space/links to the audience subgroup that makes up 95% of visitors, with the remaining 5% (often reached via a role-selection page) for everyone else.
- Up-Front Value Proposition (C2) gives a concrete, four-step, customer-tested process (team brainstorm → stakeholder shortlist → customer importance/uniqueness rating → customer pick) for arriving at the one-sentence promise that anchors a homepage — directly extending the “decide on the Web site’s value proposition” step named but not detailed back in Web Site Development Process‘s Discovery phase.
- Both patterns lean heavily on other patterns — Search Action Module, grid layout, page templates, clear first reads, Multiple Ways to Navigate — reinforcing the “pattern language” idea from Web Design Patterns that patterns complete and reference each other rather than standing alone.