No matter how many pages lie within, your homepage is how the world identifies you. When you win an award for your site, the screen shot is your homepage. When people critique your website, they start with the homepage. It holds enormous importance compared to every other page of your site.
The homepage is the destination that you try to send everyone to; the front door to your online presence; the first and most important page that you own. Wars are fought over the virtual landscape of the homepage. Pitched battles take place over who will have a link, a feature, or a navigation item there. Because everyone calls this page home, everyone has a stake in what lives there. Each stakeholder group has a different agenda and these competing interests lobby hard to see their vision of the homepage made reality.
Higher education homepages are some of the most complex battlegrounds around. Built correctly, they should focus primarily on prospective students. In reality, they are often a struggle to be everything to everyone and end up being less than they could be to anyone.
So I ask you this simple question — why struggle?
Why force everyone to live in the same house when they have completely different needs and priorities?
That’s the question we asked ourselves when we were tasked with developing a homepage for the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Every year, the SUNY system accepts millions of applications for its 64 campuses. In 2013, SUNY had more than 460,000 students enrolled, and employed more than 100,000 faculty and staff. These internal and external groups needed completely different things from their homepage. Instead of fighting it out, we decided to take a completely different approach:
Create two homepages.
The page for prospective students and external audiences is www.suny.edu. The page for faculty, staff, and administrators is system.suny.edu. Each group gets a page completely devoted to them. Navigation, features, feeds, footer, everything was tailored to either the external or internal audiences. The only overlap is one small link in the top bar that points to the other site. On the back end the CMS is the same, allowing stories and announcements that are important to both internal and external audiences to be pushed to everyone.
Here’s our homepage for SUNY.edu.
And below is the System.SUNY.edu homepage.
So, did it work? The site launched in mid-March and as of the end of April:
- www.suny.edu has had 413,000 sessions. system.suny.edu has had 42,000.
- www.suny.edu has 2.9 pages/session, and system.suny.edu 4.6 pages/session.
- www.suny.edu has a 57 percent bounce rate and average time on site of three minutes, while system.suny.edu has a 23 percent bounce rate and average time on site of five minutes.
- 73 percent of visitors to www.suny.edu are new visitors, compared with 45 percent to system.suny.edu.
www.suny.edu’s purpose is to convince visitors that SUNY is the school for them and then funnel them to take actions such as applying or contacting a specific school. system.suny.edu’s purpose is to provide detailed and frequently updated policy, procedure, and benefit information to employees. These numbers indicate that the live websites are on the right path to meeting the strategic goals for each audience. So far, so good. Most importantly, there haven’t been any organized protests in defense of a single homepage. Why should there be? Everyone has a place to call home.
What do you think? Is maintaining a single page for everyone worth fighting for?