A few days ago GPWA member dannyx started a thread asking about the merits of different length home pages:

Long vs Short Home Page

Two approaches to designing home pages were mentioned in the post:

  • The home page is a showcase for the website, attractive, not too long, and not too much written text to too many keywords
  • The home page is a long page with lots of text and keywords


For this week's poll I ask how long is the home page of your main site. Besides voting in the poll, be sure to share your opinion about home page length, either in this thread or in the thread started by dannyx.

I can say that for almost all the sites I'm involved with there are lots of pages within the sites. Collectively, some recent crawls I ran showed a total of over 650,000 pages across about a dozen sites. So, I guess it is not surprising that I've been biased toward home pages that are relatively short introductions to the content of the site, mostly intended to portray the depth of information available and to point a visitor starting at the home page in the right direction based on their particular interests. One of the longest of the home pages is on GPWAtimes.org that goes on for two to three screens of information. But, on that site, most everything that matters is above the fold, and after that it's mostly just more stories going back further in time to show depth.

How about your sites?

Michael