Many years ago web portals crammed millions of buttons and banners onto their home pages and finding what you wanted was a little like a "Where's Wally" puzzle. Happily some sites like Ryanair still seem to think we have 20 minutes free to find the link we're after...they may as well hide Wally in there to make it fun.
But Google changed all that with their minimalist home page. Seth Godin in Purple Cow recounts how, in the early days, somebody kept emailing the Google web manager with the homepage word count every time Larry and Sergey added another button...some people care about your site. Google created the perfect homepage based on the key "successful outcome" of getting people to search:
- The search bar dominates by its location and size..check out Amazon's new "big" search bar to mimic this
- There is little other content to distract us, so we can find wally quickily and easily
- The cursor is winking accommodatingly in the search box when the page loads, making it ergonomically easier
Anyway, just when we thought it would be good to remove the clutter from our home page we now have to do Web 2.0 design things or we're going to fall behind. So now everybody is building sites with some of these key components:
- Icons or cartoon characters
- Rounded edges for all images and boxes
- Shadows and/or reflections where at all possible
- Short sentences, simple words
- Mid-Atlantic cool tone of voice - talk about "stuff" (Amazon had a "where's my stuff" button in 1998 so that's not new)
So now, wherever you go in crowded, competitive markets every site is looking like every other. A quick whizz around the car insurance market and the layout, look and feel are all similar...they may even all be sharing the same "get a quote" button.
