The Infinite Dial

For many content-heavy web sites, the home page is not necessarily the main landing page--the page a visitor first sees when they get to your site. As an example, for our web properties our landing pages are more likely to be a page of content from a research study, or a blog post we've written, than our actual "home page." This is because people are vastly more likely to get to our web site by clicking through from a search engine or from a link on someone else's site than they are to get to us by typing edisonresearch.com into their browser. When you reconceive your web site in this fashion--that the home page may not be the first page a visitor comes to--you can open yourself up to loads of possibilities and also free yourself of limiting beliefs regarding what has to be on your home page.

I've spoken before at numerous conferences about flipping the funnel--how a well-constructed radio station web site should have hundreds, if not thousands of pages of content all focused on single content topics, each one serving as a line in the water--more lines, more chances to catch a fish. If you don't think you have the resources to do that, you're right--you can't do it tomorrow. But over time you will get there--our web properties have over 7,000 individual pages of content, and it's not like we have an "Interactive Division!" Having lots of single-topic, content-rich pages helps in two ways. First, it's the key to search engine optimization: Google needs to know what a page is about, and if it seems to be about many things at once, a search engine correctly parses the page as "not very useful" to people searching for a given key word or phrase. Secondly, it helps you--the radio station--know a little bit about the visitor. After all, if a listener comes to your home page, you know nothing about them--and normal web users are unlikely to volunteer much beyond an email (if that) to a radio station. But if a vistor comes to your web site as a result of typing in a specific search query ("great places to see live music in Austin") and they come to a page on your site that is about live music in Austin, you know a fair amount about them--you know they like live music, they are looking to go out, and they either live in or are coming to Austin. This kind of listener/user information is gold, and is the key to really unlocking the value of your web site.

Currently, most radio station web traffic is driven by on-air mentions--"visit our home page and..." But what exactly do you want them to do when they get there? Do you want them to sign up for your VIP club? Click on a promotion? Click on an advertiser's ad? Most the time, the answer is "all of the above," which generally leads to the user not taking any action, and not exploring the site. Because most stations don't know exactly why the visitor has come to their site, most stations try to throw everything at once at the page, hoping something sticks. Hope is not a strategy, however. So many radio station home pages are gunked up with myriad offers, ads and promotions that it's almost like they are trying to "score" on the first date. But online relationships are like offline relationships. You gotta take me out to dinner first!

Better to think of your home page as a welcome page, not as the transactional hub. Actions that you want listeners to take are better off on discrete pages devoted to that specific action. If your home page is relieved of the burden of having to be all things to all people (i.e., a broadcast solution) it is free to be re-imagined and repurposed as an invitation--an entry point to explore further. I generally focus on positive examples, not negative ones, but in this particular instance a comparison is helpful, so I'll leave you with this, a tale of two landing pages.

Page 1 -- What does this page want you to do? When you do it, what does the station know about you?

Chances are, you either wanted to listen to the station (easy enough) or explore the artist currently playing (can't miss that!) Either way, you are a click away from getting what you want, and that click tells me a bit more about you.

Page 2 -- What does this page want you to do?

Less clear, and it gets worse as you scroll down (if you ever would).

To my mind, there is only one website in the world that can truly get away with being all things to all people on the home page, and that's my old friend Crazy Arngren (make sure you click the image to bask in its true, epic scope.) Hovercraft, anyone?