Your Home Page Shouldn't Scroll

That seems pretty Draconian, doesn't it?

Unfortunately,  the home pages of (winery) Web sites are typically cluttered affairs, which require a visitor to scroll and scroll and scroll to see everything.  Even our Top Ten winery Web sites from last year suffer from this problem: only two of them fit entirely on a single screen when running Internet Explorer under Windows XP on a 1024x 768 display (Clos du Val and Huntington).

Why should your home page be limited to what will fit on a single screen?  Because clutter is the biggest problem your site visitors face.  When they arrive on your home page, there are only two things they want to know:

1. Am I in the right place?
2. Where do I go to reach my goal?

If the answers to these two questions are not readily apparent, visitors are Back the way they came. 

Home pages become cluttered because "everything is important," and you're afraid of losing visitors because you didn't tell them everything. By making everything important, however, you make it much more difficult for your visitors to find the one thing that is important to them right now.

Your home page should address the goals of the four types of visitors to winery Web sites (buyers, browsers, the trade, the media) as succinctly as possible.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't engage them or tempt them to investigate further, but in this case, less is certainly much more.

If you have a cluttered home page, here's something to try.  Pare dramtically back (to a single page screen, even).  Give your new home page two weeks.  See if (a) anyone complains (and why), and (b) what happens to your site traffic.  Then go back to your old home page and apply what you've learned.  I'd be interested in hearing the results.

(Note:  you may not want to try this if you haven't already got a basic handle on your traffic, since otherwise, you have nothing to compare with.)

Feel free to disagree or add your point of view - that's why we enabled comments in our blog (even though it means managing the occasional bit of blog spam).

Comments

[Thomas Jones]

Well, since no one else stepped up, I'll disagree. I don't think that it is unfortunate that the home pages of winery Web sites require a visitor to scroll and scroll and scroll to see everything.

The reason I disagree is that I am a user myself and despite hearing the advice from 'experts' for years that no page should require scrolling...I still find sites that pursue that strategy VERY annoying. Especially, if they employ a so called 'Content Management' system.

Most winery sites have little actual content. A wine list, event calendar, contact info, retail locations list, some background info and in the few states that allow it an online store. So far, I have not found navigating these tiny sites to be hugely difficult.

What is difficult for me is finding these sites. I blame the desire to follow the TV Ad model of lots of flash and imagery with all of the text being lovely script text that has been converted into images. It has resulted in sites that are not indexed well by search engines.

If the trend continues I fear that Winery sites will face the same problem that now plagues hotel websites. They are so poorly indexed that the spam sites and big aggregators like Expedia are the only ones folks can find via the search engines.

[Mike Duffy]

Thanks for adding your comments, Thomas. (for those of you who don't know, Thomas runs a comprehensive site, Oklahoma Wine News:
http://www.nuyakacreek.com/blog/blogger.html

A question for you: what search phrase(s) are you using when you say "sites that are not indexed well by search engines"? It's hard for anyone to rank well for "pinot noir" (over 8 million results).

Obviously, rules are made to be broken, but I think a winery home page that takes more than one screen without some more compelling reason than "we have a lot of things we want to tell a visitor" ignores the fact that every site visitor already has a goal in mind.