Home Page Refresh

Try to think about the last time you renovated your living room.

Most likely, this isn't an everyday activity for many of us. On the other hand, adding a decorative item or a picture for decoration is probably a more common activity. We behave similarly to the community homepage, website, or knowledge portal. We update information items, add notices to the scrolling message board, update the events calendar, change the focus topic, and even add festive greetings when appropriate. Still, we rarely make revolutionary changes to the homepage. Changes of this type usually include adding or removing entire sections. Imagine, for example, a situation where you open your computer. Instead of a daily tip and focus topic, you can see a list of the five most popular documents and a section showing innovations from around the world in the given content area. It's as if you came to your living room and found it completely renovated. On the surface, such a move carries a risk - why change something that works and that people are used to, in the spirit of "If it ain't broken, why fix it?" We can think of three main reasons for such a move:

• Practical: The homepage is the most valuable real estate on the site. As such, it's important to maximize its potential. Conducting periodic rethinking, relying on quantitative and qualitative data, allows us to check that we are utilizing the homepage optimally. This optimal utilization will be expressed, for example, in promoting user entries to the site itself, promoting entries to specific components on the homepage, etc.

• Marketing: Creating a sense of freshness and BUZZ around the site and giving a feeling that it isn't stagnating. We must remember that in our world of changes, dynamism is part of the game rules that users expect.

• Initiatory: A comprehensive task with a "lighter" nature, such as refreshing the homepage, allows us to engage content experts who didn't take an active part in the initial characterization process (they weren't available and were defined as content experts only afterward, etc.) and to empower the sense of belonging of veteran and experienced content experts.

Good luck to all the renovators!!!

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