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Exploring Design: Outstanding Start Pages

smashingmagazine.com — Since no page is equally important as the start page, it ’s interesting to know, which approaches designers come up with, developing an innovative design for start pages. Let’s take a look. Unusual, remarkable and outstanding start pages - in a brief overview.

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  • PatrickA, on 10/11/2007, -9/+15Outstanding in the fact nobody can use them. They should be called "stop pages".
    • kevin45, on 10/11/2007, -4/+4Nobody? They're fine. What do you have, IE4?
      • Smuikas, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Nobody who uses a screenreader. Or who doesn't want to deal with clicking something just to figure out what a site is selling me.
    • jonathono2000, on 10/11/2007, -6/+4I don't get guys like you. Its like you had a professor once that didn't like start pages for some unknown reason and now you continue to regurgitate that same statement without even thinking about it. Grow a brain.
      • Smuikas, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4You want as few barriers between your user and your site as possible. A start page with a logo or "click here to continue" or "drag this to continue" are barriers to content. They're good art, bad design. Like a pretty car that nobody wants to drive.
    • hughese, on 10/11/2007, -3/+6There are people who want to get things done quickly on the Web, and people who have time to play. I'm the former, and find most of these sites to be incredibly unusable.
    • emiles, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2While I would agree if these were news sites or something, they're not. These are sites for clothing companies, artists and stuff like that, so visually appealing start pages make sense.
  • briankeith, on 10/11/2007, -5/+3I can use them just fine. The no click site was great.
    Reminds me of a couple of new products that took old tech and put s different perspective on it.
  • Scyth3, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3A lot of cool examples. I totally forgot about that "no click" site.
  • doktorrocket, on 10/11/2007, -4/+9Needs 78% more Zombo.com

    Best start page I've seen.
  • gnathon, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1Great find! It's always great to see people thinking outside the box.
  • Nocturnalsgfx, on 10/11/2007, -4/+16Outstanding? I'd say most of them suck. Mystery Meat Navigation blows.
    • roywaits, on 02/02/2008, -9/+2Guess you suck at exploring... I hate users like you.
      • Smuikas, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3And most users hate sites they can't figure out. Remember, the average IQ is 100.
      • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4I'm pretty good at "exploring" websites. It just got old 7 years ago.
  • ogletree, on 10/11/2007, -0/+22Title should say "list of sites that will never do very well in Google"
    • geoken, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3I'm assuming you're trying to take a pot shot at Flash in which case you should probably read up a little more. (and by read up a little more I'm not refering to the blog of some clueless SEO "expert" who doesn't know the first thing about flash optimization)
  • TannerC, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3Not clicking is the future.
    • kingofthisnight, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8I hope not. I found it much faster to click a button instead of waiting for a timer or doing a gesture.
  • ohjames, on 10/11/2007, -2/+17Way too much flash; way too little CSS.

    Keep it simple!
  • thailand1972, on 10/11/2007, -0/+18Yay, another list where people confuse "design" with "eye candy".

    A one page e-commerce website? https://www.shopcomposition.com/ (one of the websites in the list). So search engines just have the one page to index?

    Too many usability, accessibility and search engine issues to deal with in this list. It's 1998 all over again.
  • Shiftgood, on 10/11/2007, -7/+4Title should say "A bunch of you diggers are going to be intimidated by the time and effort and skill level of these websites and try to find ways to pick them apart to make yourself feel better"

    Those guys did an amazing job. Design like that isnt always applicable for every application, but they were spot on for what they needed to do.

    cheers.
    • roywaits, on 02/02/2008, -5/+4well said.
    • Smuikas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4I would say that solid usability design with usergroup feedback and split-testing is more difficult to do than coming up with wacky ways of breaking the usability and accessibility of the internet. Completely different skillsets involved, though, and just shows that the Artist and the Designer need to talk to each other more. Design is about making things people should want to use. Art is about making things beautiful and profound.
  • matthwk, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6These are all very interesting and may work for designers (especially Flash designers) showing off their portfolio, but they fail at navigation for the average user. Most of them have a bad case of mystery-meat-navigation.
  • Smuikas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+10The start page serves two functions:

    -Introduce a user to your site or company
    -Get them off of it as quickly as possible by providing a log in box, navigation, pertinent first-time information, and suggestions of specific places to visit.

    LeoBurnett:

    Non-intuitive design - you don't know what you're clicking on before you click on it. It's showy, but it's useless. Okay, the guy likes pencils. What is the site, when I first go there? And why would I want to go back? That's an instant back-button for most users. And since it's a flash based design, no matter where you are on the site the back button will take you back to your referral page. Boo!

    Capital Corporate Connections:

    While the rest of the site is unique and showy, you have no idea what the company does when you first go there. The start page only acts as a stumbling block to get to the rest of the site. Especially since they have to TELL the user what to click on and how to interact with it! Another flash based design that breaks the basic tenants of the web: let the user use his or her back button!! According to the article, it's "nice to explore." It is anything but - if you make a mistake you cannot reflexively hit your back button, because that would take you back to the referral page - not to whatever you were previously viewing on the site. Then you have to go through the godawful stumbling block of a splash page to get back to the actual content. Pretty and artistic --- but terrible design. It's like a chair that's nice to look at, but nobody in their right mind would ever want to sit on it.

    Yammat is interesting to look at - but what do those icons mean on the lower left hand side? There aren't even any tool tip helpers. Text in poorly coded flash is also impossible to select and copy/paste. Terrible design, but pretty. Again, an all-flash page. The long intro is only some flash developer's mental masturbation.

    SectionSeven is simply annoying to browse, especially on a laptop. Horizontal navigation is annoying, and bucks the trend of, oh.. menus. quick navigation. The 30 second loading time (on a fast corporate connection) does nothing to hamper my ire. Oh, and it's flash. No back button. This article should be titled "Amazingly beautiful but incredibly unusable flash-based designs: Examples of how not to build a web page."

    flaboy. Wow. Not only are the bouncing circles ugly, but they're annoying too. One-word links at the bottom with absolutely no context. Oh, there's a helpful text that pops up in tiny text in the lower left hand corner when you mouseover! Oh, wait, it just says "click to display content from [link word]." What? What is this site? I don't know within 20 seconds. I'm leaving. Oh, when I look at my back button I see in tiny letters, "portfolio." This guy can make ugly bouncing circles! I'm leaving! I don't even want to look at the rest of his stuff. Especially since he's an animation jerkoff trying to be a web designer without understanding simple concepts of usability.

    MHQ... why, oh why is your page longer than my browser - but my scroll wheel change what page I'm on? When designing a web page, you make a contract with your visitors - that things will work how they expect them to work. And when you change something so basic as what you use to scroll the page .. you break the contract. No cookie for you. Plus, the navigation is cludgy. Why hide what's behind, and make me scroll through other pages to get there?

    I'm not even going to go through all of them. Most of them are artists jacking off while giving their visitors the middle finger. The only even remotely clever site out of all of them is one laptop per child - it's quite clever, with the icons showing exactly what the site is all about. It's also not a flash-based design, and is very accessible - disable stylesheets and you see the site in plain English. Perfect for users who use screenreaders.

    Buried as inaccurate.
    • thailand1972, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Great review Smuikas - perhaps the fact that the back button takes you all the way back to the referral page is no bad thing :)
  • Bladeweever, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2While pretty and innovative, they're not the most intuitive to browse. A good start page should be a balance between looking good and cutting-edge, but at the same time make sense to the target market they're going after. These look cluttered and difficult to use. If I have to hover my mouse over everything just to see what it's for - or if it does anything at all, then I'm likely to get tired of it, no matter how cool it looks.

    So maybe the title is just a little misleading, as they're great looking pages.
  • Lostangel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7You know it's sites like these that make me want to hate flash with absolutely no remorse. If you built your whole site in flash... you did something wrong folks.

    Will you designers out there who keep selling giant flash sites please stop? Or if you are going to use flash, use html to deliver it in pieces rather than using one giant flash movie? Nothing's more frustrating than having to wait 10-15 seconds to find out if the page you're on is even the right page... except maybe to have your mouse wheel disabled, right click not work, and having to wait for content to "load"...

    If you're not understanding what I'm saying, please see these two sites as an example of how you should use html to deliver flash in pieces, and not use flash to deliver content. The only saving grace for flash in my opinion and the only way to use it.
    http://web.burza.hr/
    http://www.hellgatelondon.com/
  • thailand1972, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Bear in mind also that people should stop thinking of "start pages" or "home pages" for websites; a good deal of traffic will not land on your home page via a search engine, but another page specific to their search criteria.

    Well, except these Flash sites where the start page is the ONLY page....
  • FelixdaaHack, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The roll over pop-up text links in the paragraphs are neither "appealing" or "innovative"
  • baileysmooth, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The problem with all of those designs is that they only work if you know your customers are willing to engage and explore your site. They often work great for portfolio sites.

    I'm not sold on how effective they'd be for say ... a gateway for a commerce site.
  • rtphokie, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3clever != outstanding

    If visitors are immediately faced with the question "what the hell am I supposed to do?" it's not a good design.

    Too many designers create to impress each other, not their clients.
  • AnnaBay21, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1it is always interesting to explore an interest site...I mean not even because of the content but because of the interesting design
    • Shiftgood, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Anna, dont even try with these folks. They have their heads so far up their own ass. You can see that they think they're above it all. They cant even appreciate the interesting concepts or innovative design. They just bitch and moan about SEO and CSS. They're punks.
  • scisam, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1These are crap they look like magazine pages
  • ChewMyFootOff, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Outstanding if only html/css/javascript are used. Flash? Buried as lame.
  • springmedia, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0I really challenge the use of the term outstanding. They are all about the designers ego's rather than than the user. Whoever did those designs had clearly never read "don't make me think" by Steve Krug. They look pretty, but web design ultimately has to be about the visitor which seems to have been lost in these designs.
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