The home page of an online retail should have two goals; confirm to the visitor that they’ve arrived at the right place (you sell what they want) and enable them to quickly move toward the specific item they came to find.

Why is it then, that so many retail home pages are filled with huge vanity graphics which represent only a tiny fraction of the available inventory, and the navigation options are stuffed against the top or left margin in a font size and color that makes you wonder if they’re legal disclaimers?

The answer of course, is branding. Someone thinks that the home page should define the image and position of the brand. It should make an emotional connection with the visitor, presenting an indentity or appeal they favor or aspire too.

But a home page isn’t a store window, or a magazine ad, or even the cover of a print catalog. Each of those address the shopper before they’ve made the decision to actively pursue a purchase. The home page hits them after they’ve decided to take action, and stopping their momentum (the large graphics) and then making it difficult for them to restart it (hiding the navigation in mall dark type on the margins) is really counter-productive.

Think of your home page like the inside of your store or catalog – where you want people to clearly see the breadth of your offerings and (hopefully) rush towards them with excitement and anticipation of finding exactly what they want.

Zappos.com does it right. Their home page makes it clear in a fraction of a second that they sell all kinds of shoes (and other goods) and gives you literally dozens of ways to easily find the path to the specific type of shoe you want to buy. They also manage to clearly communicate several of their core brand values – service, huge selection, free shipping, and easy returns – without stopping or slowing down those who just want to buy something.

Branding and image are important, and I’m sure that if more designers were given the challenge of both presenting a high quality aesthetic and accepting that traditional navigation systems really shouldn’t be relied upon, we’d see a whole new generation of functional yet attractive home pages. This won’t happen until more of the marketers who usually give the designers their marching orders (or at least approve the final designs) change their ideas and expectations of the home page.