Defining A Good Homepage

Dateline: 05/05/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages

Personal homepages number in the millions, cover every subject imaginable, and embrace every type of format. It's a bit quixotic to try to define characteristics common to the best of the genre when the genre itself redefines the phrase "moving target." [Something like 5,000 new sites are added to GeoCities each business day - imagine trying to grasp the current state of the modern novel if 25,000 were published a week!]

There is, of course, common wisdom about what makes a good homepage, namely that it be engaging, well-organized, and updated often. Whether I find your job, your links, your hobby, or your diary "interesting" is another matter, of course. It's not enough to shout "Here I am!" into the echoing reaches of cyberspace, though I respect your right to do so. Give me a reason to care.

A truly good page (which most would say is like pornography: you know it when you see it) can lure me into thinking about Beanie Babies and politician's graves, two subjects that normally don't make it onto my radar screen, or to delve into the minds of a college basketball player and a songwriter with AIDS, two types I don't run into much in my daily life.

Did I mention update often?

No one has more truck with homepages than the premier providers of free personal webspace: GeoCities and Tripod. At the top of the list for Erika Penzer Kerekes, Director of Content and Community Development at GeoCities, is "keeping the author's personality front and center." She also emphasizes the importance of a site's "front door:"

[I like] a constantly changing front door, although within a consistent framework. In other words, the basic look and feel can stay the same, but I want a site that immediately looks different to me every time I visit!

I also enjoy a site that offers the comfort of the familiar but the excitement of the new. This is something that many of the over-designed personal sites of Web professionals and artists ignore. I don't expect the average personal-page creator to be an information designer. There are plenty of long-scrolling, messy-looking pages that tell me more about their creators and prove easier to peruse than the sterile, framed sites that make me feel like I'm a tester in Sun's user-interface lab.

Michelle Chihara, Editor of Tripod's "Triteca" section, welcomes the fungible nature of the genre: "I believe that if we are going to redefine the idea of personal publishing, then we need to be open to a wide range of formulas and slippery definitions." I agree. Too many people, especially in the old media, want to fit homepages into neat boxes. Chihara adds:

I like homepages that blur the line between homepage, zine, newsletter and even resume, portfolio, and profile. As they used to say in my improv comedy group, "What's the golden rule? There are no rules." A good homepage has a strong voice, is daring, creative. There are no easy answers. If there were, it wouldn't be so exciting.

I was particularly amused by the responses I received from two gentlemen who, I venture to say, are inundated with requests to review personal homepages: Gleason Sackman of Net Happenings and Patrick Douglas Crispen of Tourbus. They both responded to my query with nearly identical lists:

(Gleason) A good homepage should:

• load quickly even at 14.4 speeds [keeps costs down for low-end users]
• use graphics only when necessary [graphics are nice, but are they needed]
• updated on a regular basis. [who wants to read old news/items. Would you go back for another visit?]
• be easy to navigate [if you have to spend time trying to figure it out, you probably won't go back for another visit]

(Patrick) The best homepages are a blend of graphics and text that are:

• Nice to look at,
• Small enough to download in under 30 seconds on a 28.8 modem,
• Easy to navigate, and
• Accurate and timely (and is updated regularly).

Did I mention yet about updating often? :-) Actually, there's too much emphasis on daily and weekly updates. There are sites that I visit near-daily and sites that I may go to once a month or even once a year. Some content simply does not call for updates that often - although I deeply appreciate those that establish a schedule and stick to it.

Both Patrick and Gleason focus on quick downloads. Ross Winston, the webmaster of the Best Of The Web awards, puts that request into a broader context:

The biggest challenge is to deliver content in a manner that pushes the boundaries of the medium yet does not alienate any potential visitor. You can use new technologies, plug-ins, and other enhancements to make your site cool, but you should always consider the fundamental concept of platform independence.

My rule is that everything - site organization, graphics, information presentation - must be in service of the content. If it competes, impedes, or ignores, then it is doing your site a disservice. And if a technology throws a gate up in front of your site, think twice about using it.

Now it's time for me to add my final two cents. Since I'm in an alliterative mood, I give you the Eight "I"s Of A Good Homepage:

• Idiom - Find your own personal idiom, or characteristic way of expressing yourself. The result: A page only you could have a created. There won't be another viewfinder for the universe like it anywhere.
• Intrepid - Be dauntless. Don't get discouraged.
• Illumine - If your page enlightens, it will draw them back.
• Irritate - Don't be afraid to share your dislikes. Be cranky if you feel like it. Issue a challenge.
• Intricate and Intuitive - Give me layers, but ones I can handle.
• Integrate - Everything should hang together. Don't give me "everything" unless it does.
• Insanity - Take chances. Period.