Morville on unhealthy fixations with the home page

Peter Morville writes elegantly on his approach to user experience design for web sites. There's a couple of great diagrams for information architecture practitioners, which help to capture the different components to be considered when designing. Of most interest to me was his recent focus on findability. I particularly enjoyed the following line:

... in which we used findability concepts and [Search Engine Optimisation] statistics to alleviate an unhealthy fixation on the home page, raising awareness of the need to design findable documents for direct access via the Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines.

This echoes a common concern we have here at Synop, that finding useful/relevant information is much more important than almost any other aspect of your web site's design and implementation. That's why in Sytadel we ensure that all URLs encode any parameters using slash (/) notation, not in cgi (?) notation, thereby allowing search engines to discover documents easily. That's why our consulting methodology on information architecture is concerned with usage patterns - how does a user find the information they need / what's their pathway through the web site. That's why we use, distribute and recommend Panoptic, a highly effective enterprise search engine designed to get you the right documents early in your search results.

Of course, a fixation with the home page may reflect an organisation's discovery in their web site statistics that by mandating the intranet home page as the starting page for their standard operating environment, people hit the home page an awful lot. Sadly, it doesn't mean they necessarily read or take in anything on this page, they just haven't learned how to reset it to something more useful.

In fact, I would argue that the effectiveness of home pages should be measured in a similar manner to the way Google and other search engines no doubt measure theirs - how fast do people leave this page having found the information they are looking for. In other words, the less time spent on it the better.