Home Page Content

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The home page can be used to highlight some information that lives under one of the sections of the site, i.e., highlight an upcoming meeting or event, with a link for more information to the specific event. Other potential elements on the home page could be a calendar, map of local section,  and any other information you think your users might want to have quick access to. At the same time you should use caution with the amount of information you put on any page and not overwhelm your site visitors with text, graphics, colors or any other elements. Especially on the web, less is more.

Be thoughtful of your users
If you offer Word documents, PDFs or other files for download, look at the file sizes—how long will downloading take? Not all visitors have broadband connections. For users on dialup, a 1MB file could take half an hour or more to download which is not good for usability. Consider using ordinary web pages for this content instead.

Once you have your content in place, it’s time to test. Make sure all links are active and go where they are supposed to go. Is information accurate and complete--do a little copyediting. Do all the applications that you added to your site work properly?

Remember:

• Think of the end user and what they need from your site
• Content is king - people come to your site to find information, not look at pretty graphics
• Just because others do something on their site, it doesn’t mean you have to do it on yours
• Less is More
• Keep your site fresh with regularly updated content
• Keep it short - most web users are in a hurry
• Keep it clear and simple - this is good for accessibility, and helps everyone else too
• Be critical of writing style and presentation - because you want a quality website