The article page gateway
If you need convincing that work on the article page of a website is now more important than work on the front page, take this quote from
The Article Page: New Kingpin of Online News?, a Steve Outing piece on article page design. The example is The Globe and Mail, who redesigned their article pages last year to make them easier to use and link to more stuff:
“So, did this design change make much of a difference? Frame reports: ‘Literally overnight daily page-views increased by more than 25%, from about 2.3 million pageviews a day to 3.0 million pageviews a day. That works out to about one extra pageview for each daily unique visitor to the site.”
Wow. And you have to say that what they’ve done isn’t rocket science, just good, sensible clear layout.