Comments on: The ‘Home’ Link

By: Raphael Murrell

Raphael Murrell — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 16:32:45 +0000

What about designing for a particular market/age group.

If i’m designing for a age/group that already knows about the “click the logo to go home damn it” issue, should I leave out the classic ‘home’ link?

I think I can.

I’m sure if a survey is done about which age group knows that the logo is the way to go home (without thinking it), It would be a younger age group.

…and yes I know that I should be designing for everyone…

P.S. #3 | Richard Medek Post
people like that have no business going online

By: Henri Bergius

Henri Bergius — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:32:15 +0000

I think it has been in usability guidelines of Jakob Nielsen for quite a while now, that the site logo is where most users look for the “Home” link.

Of course, to make it more semantic, the Microformats folks suggest marking it with a rel=”home”:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-home

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:04:05 +0000

How much of your traffic comes from search engines? How many times have you visited a site for the first time from a SE results page? Or any kind of link that sends you deeply into the structure of a site? (read: archives)

Home links are really important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go to the address bar of the browser to manually get back to the root of a Web site — which is ridiculous.

By: RonnieSan

RonnieSan — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:54:08 +0000

It’s also a good idea to make the link text of the Home link something relevant. The home link is a link to the most important page of your web site. If it’s a Design Web site, you might think of making the link text something like “Web Design Home”.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:26:19 +0000

Is there a different name anyone can think of besides ‘home’? Hmmm, I will create a new entry for this I guess so don’t answer here unless you really need to ;-).

By: Vincent

Vincent — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:32:57 +0000

Its all about your target audiance. Experianced users will use both. Professionals may even be offended by the home link.

But in most cases your desiging for people who maybe spend an hour a week on the net. (those who have actual lives :P) And those people still need there home link.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:38:40 +0000

We have definitely put thought into it and still weighing the positives and negatives of the whole situation. Guess we should put a little more thought into it moving forward.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:28:18 +0000

Honestly, I think you need to spin off Whitespace to its own domain. Besides the home navigation issue, it’s also confusing to see a directory of the network also being listed as a member of said network.

Something to think about, anyway.

By: Mario

Mario — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:25:01 +0000

In my experience the Home of extreme importance as usefull.

The problem with having something saying “Home” is that we are assuming a person knows that the meaning of the word Home on a website is going to the 1st page, not searching for a home…

So maybe we got a problem here.

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:01:58 +0000

Mark: You bring up a good point. When does a directory count as its own site and do we need to keep things consistent across the whole directory of sites. Maybe include the 9rules top nav on WS would make things easier?