Let’s hear it for home pages.
A while back we were reviewing the existing home page for a prospective client and I asked what the purpose of the page was. His response was that it had to make all the points necessary to attract the interest of anyone who could possibly become a client. The number of points? Well… the page had about a dozen.
If you’re reading this and you are a branding professional you probably just imploded.
For me the implosion somehow immediately resulted in my thinking of an obscure animated film by the similarly obscure Harry Nilsson. One quote in particular came to mind:
“A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.”
The story is about a round-headed boy in a world where by law everyone and everything had to have a physical point. And thus everyone else has pointy heads except him.
Yes, it’s a little odd. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Perhaps unintentionally, the quote exposes a truth about developing a compelling identity. If you try to be appealing to everyone you end up being completely unremarkable. Physically speaking you become indistinct, smooth, and forgettable. Anything on which people could focus just becomes a blur. The moment you pick a direction and go (thus establishing your point) both you and the people you hope to attract can begin relating to each other.
I said “unintentionally” because as it turns out, Nilsson came up with this whole concept in a way that didn’t have much to do with branding. Here’s what he said about how he came up with the concept:
“I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all
came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses
came to point. I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it
doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.’”
Ahem.
Say “no” to drugs, kids.
Hahah, the last bit was funny, Tate. The first quote is good though! That is very sound advice for helping clients see the value of sticking to a few main goals for the home page.
I thought the old NASA website did a particularly good job for site that has a wide variety of visitors, all with different purposes for visiting. Right at the beginning you had to choose what category you belonged to: Public, Educators, Students, Employees, etc. They still have that navigation at the top in the current iteration, but I liked the way it was on the other site better.