How Google manages its homepage
By Gerry McGovernAn average person can deal with only 7-10 choices on a webpage, according to Google research. That's why it's so hard to get a link on the Google homepage.
Marissa Mayer is the director of Google's consumer web products. Part of her responsibility is deciding what goes on the homepage. "I have to say no to a lot of people," she told Fast Company magazine.
Google has over 30 major services and tools. You can access eight of them directly from the homepage. Google decides what goes on its homepage based on a Darwinian process of popularity.
"To make it to the home page, a new service needs to be so compelling that it will garner millions of page views per day," Fast Company states. "Contenders audition on the advanced-search page; if they prove their mettle--as image search did, growing from 700,000 page views daily to 2 million in two weeks--they may earn a permanent link. Few make the cut, and that's fine."
You can let your homepage and website run wild. You can abdicate responsibility and say that it's a new world and its all about collaboration and freedom of expression and all that. You can claim that you simply don't have the authority to say no. But that's not good enough.
Those who want a simple life avoid complexity. It is much more complex and demanding to say no than to say yes. It is much more complex and demanding to shorten a piece of content until it is clear and compelling than to put up thousands of words of waffle.
Customers and staff are in control on the Web. They chose what they want to read, what they want to do. Many communicators fail to understand this major shift. Shoving and pushing content at someone in the hope that just because it's in front of them they will read it is a failed strategy.
Google makes its money from advertising. Its advertising strategy is based on the exact same philosophy as its homepage strategy: serve the customer, make life simple for them, save them time. Google is obsessed with RELEVANCE. It doesn't shove irrelevant ads in your face. It shows you ads that relate to what you are interested in.
Those that thrive on the Web put the needs of the customer first. That's what makes the Web such an exciting and empowering space. We, the customer, decide the websites we want to visit, decide what content we want to read.
Collaboration has become a fashionable idea within organizations. Some think that if you buy collaborative software and put it on the intranet, staff will start collaborating. Not true. Unless you encourage and reward collaboration, unless it is actively promoted by senior management, it won't happen. You can buy all the software you want, and you can leave a big banner ad on your homepage for a year. It won't happen.
It takes a lot of management skill to give people just what they need-and no more. It takes courage to say no. It takes leadership to genuinely put the customer first. That's what the Web demands. Google shows what the rewards can be.
Gerry McGovern
Beauty of Simplicity (Fast Company article)
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