Welcome Messages Must Die

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synoppsys: Welcome messages on home pages waste our visitors’ valuable time.

I attended Jared Spool’s UIE conference in Boston a couple months ago. It was a fantastic learning experience. During Gerry McGovern’s presentation on killer web content, he told us to stop saying “welcome” on our home pages. Our visitors know where they are, and we’re wasting their valuable time and our precious chance to grab their attention with a big “Welcome!” banner. I was horrified to think that we’ve got those introductory welcome paragraphs on nearly every one of our web sites. How could I have missed something so obvious?

When you feel the need to welcome your visitors to your site just like you would if they were to arrive at your physical front door, it probably means your site is still in “brochureware” mode: your site is designed from the perspective of your organization. I have no statistics to support this, but I would guess higher education web sites are generally way behind e-commerce sites in their evolution from organization-centric to user-centric design. Think about how often you see mission statements on the home pages of non-profit organizations.

Gerry’s message is clear to me: don’t waste valuable real estate on warm and fuzzy welcome messages. Jakob Nielsen calls these introductions, “blah-blah text.” One participant in a web site redesign summed it up well: she said she had been trained over the years to NOT read the wordy stuff on the home page.