When you’re start-up has reportedly received $10+ million in funding, with staff pouring their collective hearts into the development effort and trying to rebound from some early negative press (with some success, it must be said), then I imagine you would be pretty keen to hit a few winners.

Likewise, when the success of your product depends on people leaving a very comfortable, familiar environment (their current browser) for a new browsing environment and workflow, your public pitch needs to be as compelling as absolutely possible.

Therefore I was quite interested to see Flock, the company behind the ‘social’ web browser of the same name, launch a redesign of their web site early in June 2006, and I thought I would write up my brief impressions here.

There are plenty of reviews out there of the Flock browser itself, but for the sake of this review we will just assume it’s fab and go from there.

The site itself serves users a number of user groups, but for the purpose of this review we will just look at how newcomers interact with the site, and that is primarily via the home page and the download page.

The home page

The Flock home page, stylistically speaking, looks great. Lots of whitespace keeps things light and airy, the restrained use of colour, borrowing hues of blue from the (newish?) logo works really well and some cute touches such as the orange, star-in-circle graphic at the bottom of the page top things off nicely.

Bryan Veloso of Avalonstar fame was responsible for some of these touches (Brian described his experience here), and they certainly lift the design. The yellow starburst graphic mars what is an otherwise attractive page, but the platform specific text in the starburst itself is a nice subtle touch.

Its also pleasing to see another Drupal site which doesn’t show its roots (immediately at least). Drupal’s themeing system can be somewhat cumbersome to work with, so credit to the team for keeping the CMS largely invisible in the design, as all good CMS’s should be.

The home page does, however, suffers from what I’ll describe as ‘mini home page syndrome’. For some reason, this is a trend that seems to have engulfed a lot of newer, product oriented sites of late, and I have no idea why.

Diagnosing ‘Mini home page syndrome’

Symptoms of mini home page syndrome include barely mentioning what your product actually does or why you should use it. Instead, a couple of sentences with a few key links are used. Material which may otherwise be relevant (product features, blog posts, extensions, testimonials, forum topics etc) is also largely kept off the front page. Its a strange syndrome.

At a guess, I imagine the thinking behind this is probably attributable to some sort of quasi-rule, like a 5 second rule where you expect the user to be able to grasp the entire concept behind your product in 5 seconds, which equates to a few short sentences. However applying such a rule means you limit your pitch to only what can be comprehended in 5 seconds, and leaves out a lot of important stuff that users may otherwise find compelling. I think its fair to say any kind of ‘5 second rule’ is pretty bogus - I find it hard to believe users would do a runner should you give them more than 5 seconds worth of information. I don’t know if the Flock guys did or didn’t use this, but I think the general point is worth making.

The thinking behind the Flock strategy also includes a fairly linear view of the path users take through your site. That is, they hit the home page, get their 5 second pitch, and move on to the next page. That means you have to give people an excellent reason (or number of reasons) to click through, which is hard to do in a 5 second pitch. Also, unless you are getting 100% conversion rate from your home page to the next key page, in Flock’s case the download page, you are losing potential users and/or customers.

The download page

It’s fascinating to compare Flock’s home page to its download page.

In my view, the download page makes a far stronger home page than the home page itself.

Why?

Well, for a start it includes a giant, obvious call to action (download!) so you know exactly what you’re supposed to do. This is a great example of strong trigger words - it doesn’t get any more obvious than “Download the Flock beta”, which is far stronger than the starburst used on the front page. Keep in mind this is the main aim of Flock’s site - to get people to download their browser.

The next great thing about the download page is the rundown of key features. Short, snappy descriptions with neat icons make them easy to skim. Flock does have a features widget on the home page, but I would guess this is almost entirely invisible to users browsing the site, giving off zero scent. No scent = no interest.

Lastly we have the testimonials. Your product rocks. Big names rave about it. You don’t put that on your home page? Well, at least they are on the downloads page I guess…

When did people get scared of big home pages? They don’t have to be huge, or cluttered, or overwhelm a user with information. They do need to present users with information that may be of interest to them. The Firefox home page does a better job of this, if only for the clear download link and descriptive list of features.

Breaking out of mini home page syndrome isn’t hard. Doing so might just give your product a free, quick and easy boost. In Flock’s case it may be as simple as swapping one page for another!