Most visitors never see your homepage first. Learn how to make every page orient a newcomer, from clear menu labels to the questions each page must answer.

Article:

Businesses tend to imagine their website as a building with a single grand entrance. Visitors are told to begin at the homepage, proceed to the relevant section and arrive gently at the page they need. Real visitors do nothing of the kind. They search for a specific question, click a result and land in the middle of the site, with no knowledge of what surrounds them.

Visitors arrive sideways

An inner page is often the first and only page a person sees. If it assumes that they have already read the introduction, it will confuse them. The homepage remains important for those who type the address directly, but for many others, the page they land on is the homepage in every respect that matters.

Three questions every page should answer

A newcomer should be able to establish, within a moment, where they are, what this page offers and what they might reasonably do next. The first is settled by a clear title and visible navigation. The second is settled by a plain opening sentence, not a slogan. The third is settled by a natural onward step, whether that is a related page, a price list or a way to make contact. A page that answers all three rarely needs to be clever.

Navigation is a promise

Menu labels should reflect the language of customers, not the internal vocabulary of the company. A department may call its offering "solutions architecture"; a visitor is looking for "help with our website". Each label promises what lies behind it, and a misleading promise costs trust. Keep menus short, and resist adding items simply because a colleague requested one.

Audit by landing page

Analytics reports will show which pages people actually enter through. Take the ten most common and view each as a stranger would: with no context, no history and no patience. Anything that puzzles you will puzzle them. Where such problems are structural, involving menus, templates or page hierarchy, they may call for the attention of a website development team instead of a quick edit.

The homepage will always matter. It is simply no longer the only door, and a site designed as though it were will keep losing people at the others.