The homepage should contain the following content:
Rationale: Users will not stay at a website if:
The most important content of a webpage should be at the top (and on the left side).
Rationale: This minimizes the amount of scrolling the user must perform to get to the meat of the site.
Every webpage should be branded with the logo and tag line of the website's owner.
Rationale: Commercial websites must be consistent with the brand of the website's owner. This enhances marketing and reinforces the brand.
Provide unique content in the website.
Rationale: This enables the website to compete for hits against similar websites.
Continually update the content of the website.
Rationale: This greatly helps create repeat hits.
The organization of a website should be based on either the logical structure of the content or on the content needed by each role played by users.
Rationale: This ensures that the organization of the website is understandable and therefore navigable. The organization of the website should be self explanatory.
Large websites should provide a search engine.
Rationale: This ensures that navigation is successful and quick. It can be hard to find specific content in large websites, even if they are well organized.
Every webpage should provide a last revised date.
Rationale: Content needs to be updated continually. A revision date enables users to know how recent the content is.
Each page should provide an email address to allow the user to contact the owner or webmaster of the site.
Rationale: This allows users to follow up with questions and recommendations. Making the email address a link makes it easier (and more likely) that the user will send emails.