bluesyemre

• The assumptions driving the architecture and feature sets of Web sites are often wrong. Years ago, we spent years building big, complicated Web sites when our users really wanted a good search engine on top of a PDF repository. We’ve spent hundreds of hours building interactive Web sites, when all our users want to do is find and read information, which this brilliant piece from the Onion captures perfectly. Perfectly, I reiterate. Post it everywhere. Perhaps users also don’t really respond to complicated, editorially curated home pages. A recent post in the Columbia Journalism Review notes that many major sites no longer derive most of their traffic from the home page and its inherent hierarchy: Less than half of visits to nytimes.com start on the homepage. More than half of Buzzfeed’s visitors come from search and social. And a mere 12 percent of visits to The Atlantic start with the homepage.

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