Home Page Linkfest Part 2
2nd edition — by Patrick McNeil — Apr. 16, 2007
The Design Problem
Designing home pages is hard enough. But needing to design a home page that is to be a major linkfest can be even tougher. In some ways designing for Design Metldown has become difficult in this exact way. I know that as my content base grows I will eventually need to rethink the home page. It is already moving towards a bit of chaos.
The range of sites I have sampled for this article is rather broad. On the one hand you have mega news sites like
CNET; and on the other end you have essentially a regular blog in
64k. The reason I did this is to hopefully cross pollinate ideas. Take a look at
adobe.com and you no doubt can dig into what you want. A blog should be no different, when you land on a blog you should be able to dig in and get the content you are looking for.
It seems to me that the biggest design element to consider when dealing with loads of links is hierarchy. Create a list of all the content for the site and order it by importance. Then be sure to establish a visual hierarchy that follows this, easily enabling the user to take in the large amount of content as easily as possible.
Sample Usage
Links
Strategies
for successful portal design
Design
Guild (A whole mess of Portal Articles)
