Pages

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

What's Your Home Screen?

When you open up your browser, whether its Chrome or Firefox or Safari or even Internet Explorer, what is your home screen?  Do you go to Google search or Apple.com or have you never changed it from its initial pre-set?  It seems to me that the greatest opportunity for success in the online space will come from the internet company that can best educate consumers to lead them to make such a "bold" change. 

I say this because of all the news coming out of Yahoo at its Newfront presentation to build new portals and new long form original content.  From a new site to be called Yahoo Travel to shows from Katie Couric, Netflix like series, and concerts from Live Nation, Yahoo is aggressively building content to reach consumers and generate additional advertising revenue.  Content is king in this scenario and I love the approach.  At the same time, I adhere to the principal that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound.  Once these shows are produced and ready for consumption, what can be done for an audience to hear about them and seek out these content choices.

And that is what brings me back to the home page.  I believe that a superior home page experience still needs to be built and promoted.  An aggregated experience that is both adaptable for consumers' needs and frequently updated to push categories and topics of interest to help drive consumers to new and interesting content.  Content is important but so is "discoverability" of that content and reminders that is it easily reachable. 

So what is your home page?  Mine is Feedly but I am open to change.  Convince me to make Yahoo my home page or tell me what other options are there to provide a non-biased window to content that best suits my needs and interests.  At the same time, it shouldn't be so cluttered that it looks like a mess.  I believe there is still an opportunity to build a better "home base" that even when consumers leave their home page to explore other web content, they still want to come back to their home page for new updates and discovery.  "If you build it, they will come" and I haven't seen anyone build the best home screen yet.  Prove me wrong.