Home
There have been a few other sites talking about the concept of the home link in site navigation elements. Scrivs talks about it not being a good thing to not include the home link. Keith brings up the point that if a site has multiple sub-sites (for instance at the hospital where he works), is the home page the main page of that sub-site, or the main hospital site?
I have always used home in my navigation structures. Even though I also link the logo to the home page, not everyone knows that is also a common practice and therefore doesn’t know that the home page is accessible via that link.
As for the question of multiple sub-sites within a site, that is a hard one to answer because each situation is likely to be unique. For instance, in a recent project I worked on, I used “home” to link to the home page of the sub-site, but in the footer, I included a clear link back to the main Web site’s home page, even though it is only a “portal” of sorts.
The term home page has become the defacto standard, it seems, when referring to the main page of a website. However, in a meeting with a client a few years ago, we were letting the client “drive”, looking at different sites, getting feedback on what they liked, didn’t like, etc. At one point, we asked the client to go back to the home page, meaning of course the home page of the site we were currently viewing. The clients initial inclination was to click the “Home” icon in the browser toolbar.
Is the term “home page” too synonymous? Would a normal, everyday web user consider know that the home page of their browser and the home page of the site they are at are two different things?
July 9th, 2004
I think they do know the difference between ‘the buttons on the screen that stay the same no matter which site you’re on’ and the home link on a webpage.
The miscommunication probably arose because you asked that client instead of offering a clear link in the navigation of the page you were viewing. Because that is where visitors will be looking for a link to the homepage.
It also does make sense to talk about a ’section home’ but most users usually do not form a mental map of a site they’re on as we designers do. Unfortunately.
I prefer to give the subsections clear names, and refer to them by name instead of subsection home. I also want to make it extra clear that they are in the section by providing clear subnavigation hints.
It might make sense to use the familiar concept crumbtrail as a backup, a lot of people do get that concept