Redeveloping the Museum’s front page
By: Dr Lynda Kelly, Category: Museullaneous, Date: 08 Aug 2011
Given the changes in how we use technology, especially the rise of tablets and mobile devices, what is the role of a website front page?
As we go in to re-developing our front page I’m wondering what is the role of the page, given the current trends towards ever increasing use of mobile devices and tablets? Do we even need a front page (or website for that matter) anymore and, if so, what does it need to do?
We have identified three things we think our front page needs to highlight:
- what’s on at the Museum’s physical site;
- what’s happening in the research and collections area; and
- what’s happening on the Museum’s website.
At the moment we are looking at a range of other front pages to see best practice; consulting with internal stakeholders and talking to our users – some preliminary results from interviews are here, and from stats logs here.
We'll keep you posted on our progress. Meantime, am curious to know - what do you think is the role of a website front page??
This from @sebchan: "i think you need to segment out the Sydney visitors then look at how many use the home page as their 'landing page'. that will show a quite different skew to those who visit the home page at any time in their visit. you probably want to segment further by keywords assuming most traffic comes via search. as that will also show different intentions. 5% home page is pretty normal these days. If i google 'australian museum' i already get presented with 9 different options of pages in your site to start at, of which only one is the home page. UNLESS, of course, I am using a mobile."