Hi Udo,
Thanks for you comments. I think I understand what you're saying; but let me ramble on a bit just to be sure...
We've developed with the idea that most traffic would come from search-engines, and go straight to a deep-link - immediately showing the user exactly what they were looking for, and getting them in and out of the site as quickly as possible (I'm sure I've read that one of Google's goals is to continually drive DOWN the amount of time people spend on searching.)
For repeat visitors, we assume users already know what the site does, and thought a cluttered home-page would be annoying (basically because that's how we feel about other sites in the same sector.)
I guess we hadn't considered the third type of visitor - the explorers - people who've wandered over from a forum or blog to take a look out of curiosity. You're probably right, we should be more aware that people following links from blogs may not actually know what the site does.
With that in mind, do people (generally) think signature links should go to customized landing pages? e.g. example.com/new_users ?? Or, should site designers just work harder and smarter to make sure the site home-page works just as well for repeat visitors as for new users?
(I'm already thinking of how to optimize for repeat vs new visitors using cookies, and seeing the flaws: you only detect repeat visitors on the same computer. Maybe I'm worrying about nothing and repeat users will willingly accept and understand the fact you're showing them the 'new user' page even if they're not...?)
|