Homepage Paralysis

There is an overabundance of opinions about the makeup of website homepages. Some say it should be long, others say short.  Some say full of information, others say as little info as possible.  Two great contrasting examples of this are Google.com and Yahoo.com.  Both companies offer the same type information, but they approach the delivery of that information drastically different.  Google is simple - straight to the point.  Yahoo is complex - offering a plethora of information and leaving you with the responsibility to determine what is important.  So what approach should you take?

It will take more than I can offer in this blog to determine that.  But, I would like to give you some food for thought that may help you make your decision.

Two researchers, Eldar Shafir and Donald Redelmeier, conducted a study on the effect choice has on our decisions.  The study evaluated the decisions of two groups of college students faced with two sets of choices.  The first groups was given the following two choices:

Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening, or

Go to the library and study.

The second group of students were given the following three choices:

Attend the lecture mentioned above.

Go to the library and study.

Watch a foreign film that you've been wanting to see.

Of the first group of students, only 21% decided to take the less desirable route and go to the library to study.  So, with the second, we would assume that the 79% that chose to attend the lecture, would then be split between the lecture and the film leaving the same 21% to go to the library and study.  However, decisions can be paralyzing. In the second group, 40% decided to go to the library and study.  As it turns out, giving people two good alternatives to studying instead of just one makes them less likely to choose either.

So how does this apply to your church, non-profit, or small business website? The moment your visitors hit your home page, they are faced with a decision - where to go from here.  Are you causing decision paralysis?  Or, are your visitors comfortable enough to continue on?  Believe it or not, you could be loosing visitors because you offer too many good options.  You may be making it difficult for your visitors to decide what they want, and they could be leaving your site for one that has fewer choices!