Pandia presents a lean, mean and uncluttered home page.

From time to time any website owner will have to take a new look at her or his website design.

Several of our Adwords advertisers have asked us specifically for more space on the home page, and given that it is our advertisers and sponsors that ultimately pay our bills, we tend to listen to them very carefully.

However, all web designers know the pain of adding more content to a web page, especially “above the fold” as it is called, i.e. the space any visitor will see without having to scroll down. In our case most of that space was spoken for, even if we had set aside some white space to let the page “breathe”.

The home page is especially important, as a significant proportion of our visitors enter our site that way. If they find the page uninformative, confusing, slow loading or — even worse — unprofessional, they will hit that back button within 10 seconds.

Most of all it is important that the visitors immediately understand what the site is about, essentially what the site can do for them.

What makes this even more complicated are the needs of the search engines. The home page must include copy with the most relevant keywords.

Too much information

Our previous home page tried to solve these problems by presenting most of our sections and features with separate subheadings and paragraphs describing the services given. Unfortunately this meant a lot of text, and visitors may easily be overwhelmed by so much info.

So this time, when redesigning the home page, we decided to take away much of the clutter, focusing on the human visitors, not the search engines.

We figure that the search engines have so many pages of our site indexed by now, that the links to the home page from other pages on the site should give them a pretty good idea on what this site is about. Moreover, we do include many of the most important keyword phrases in links to other pages as well.

Less text, more white space

So what have we done? Well, we now present all search tool on the left hand side of the home page. The search form has been moved down into the main section of the page, and placed above links to all our own all-in-one search resource pages.

On the right hand side we have put links to our most important informational pages and sections, as well as links to our recent new headlines.

We have also added more white space, helping users identifying the various sections of the page in the process.

And that’s about it really. All the paragraphs describing the various features have been removed. The code has been reduced by more than 50 percent, increasing the speed of the page significantly.

From Pandia’s history

The Pandia home page originally started out as a all-in-one search tool page in December 1998 (as this copy from May 1999 will testify).

Later in 1999 we moved this service onto a separate Powersearch page, and turned the home page into a more generic gateway (example; October 1999).

By 2001 we were including news on the front page, as well as more information on the content of the site ( see home page for early March 2001). By the end of March 2001 we had abandoned the fixed width format of the old home page and moved over to the flexible “wall-to-wall” design we are using now.

Incremental innovation

Companies will normally hire professionals when upgrading their sites, often redesigning the whole site in the process. Given that we are two people running Pandia on part time, this is impossible. We cannot afford to hire outsiders, and we do not have the time to replace all the old pages with new ones.

What we can do, however, is to improve parts of the site, step by step, and in the long run we have found this to be just as effective as any radical redesign program. So, the Pandia you see now is the end-product of eight years of Pandia design experience.

By the way: SEOMoz also changed its design this week.