What is a homepage?
The homepage is the page at the bare address: riot.nyc, with nothing after it. It is the page a visitor lands on when they type the brand in, click the logo or follow a link that was not aimed at anything in particular. Its job is to say who the brand is, what it does and what to do next, and to route everyone else to the page they actually came for.
Because it has to serve everyone, it is the hardest page on the site to design. The new visitor needs an introduction; the returning customer needs the way to the shop; the journalist wants the press page; the recruit wants careers. The homepage cannot be all of those pages, so it has to be the best possible lobby for them, with a clear sense of the building.
Why it matters
Why a homepage matters
The homepage is the brand's handshake, and it is usually the most visited single page on the site, especially for any brand people search by name. It sets the tone for every page that follows and it carries a large share of the site's authority, which is why the links on it matter so much for search. It is also the page the whole company has an opinion about, which is why it tends to accumulate: a banner for the sale, a block for the new product, a badge for the award, until the handshake becomes a noticeboard.
In practice
How a homepage works in practice
- 01
We design the homepage last, after the rest of the site, because only then is it clear what it has to point to. It gets one idea above the fold (for a studio, the work; for a store, the season; for a product, the thing it does), one clear next step, and then a short, ordered tour: what we do, who we have done it for, proof, a way to get in touch. Every section earns its place by answering a question a real visitor has.
- 02
Then it is built to be fast, because it takes the most traffic and the most new traffic, and it is kept under review. The sections get measured, the ones nobody scrolls to get cut, and the page is revisited each time the business changes. A homepage is never finished; it is a standing statement of what the brand is about right now.
At RIOT
Homepages at RIOT
riot.nyc is a WordPress site we design and build ourselves, and its homepage leads with film, because we are a creative agency and production studio and the work introduces us better than a paragraph could. The words, the services, the clients and the way to send a brief follow in that order, for the visitor who wants to know more.
Watch out
What people get wrong about homepages
Treating it as the whole site. Most visitors arrive on an inner page from search or social and never see the homepage at all, so a brand that spends its entire budget on it has polished the lobby and left the rooms bare. Second, the committee homepage, where every department gets a block and the visitor gets nothing. Third, the hero slider: five rotating messages is the design language of not deciding, and almost nobody clicks past the first.
