The homepage is not a junk drawer
Every department wants a shelf on the homepage. Four questions for deciding what actually earns the space, and where the soy sauce packets go instead.
Every house has the drawer. Batteries in unknown states of charge. Soy sauce packets from a restaurant that closed. A key that opens a door nobody can identify, forty rubber bands, one birthday candle. Nothing in there is exactly useless. It’s all in the drawer because, at some point, someone chose not to decide.
Most homepages are that drawer, rendered in HTML.
It never starts that way. Redesigns begin with clean comps and a clear story, and everyone in the kickoff nods at words like “focus.” Then the requests arrive. Sales needs the demo button above the fold. Marketing has three campaigns running, each described, separately and sincerely, as the priority. HR is hiring and careers “really needs visibility right now.” The CEO would like the industry award badge somewhere prominent, which everyone understands to mean the top. Legal has a sentence to add. Legal always has a sentence.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: every one of those requests is reasonable. That’s what makes this politics rather than vandalism. Nobody’s wrong. There are simply eleven right answers and one page.
So the homepage fills, because the homepage is the most visible page in the company and therefore the most political, and visibility on it starts standing in for mattering at all. You can usually read an org chart in a homepage.
A carousel is rarely a design decision; it’s a meeting that ended in a tie.
Four questions that earn the space
When we untangle one of these, we run every element through the same four questions. They’re simple. They’re also surprisingly hard to answer out loud in a conference room.
- Would a stranger care in the first ten seconds? The homepage’s primary audience is people who don’t know you yet. Not the board, not the team, not the customer of nine years who bookmarked the login page anyway. If an element only means something to insiders, it’s decor for employees.
- Does it help a visitor decide what to do next? A homepage is a lobby. A good lobby has clear signage and someone at the desk, not the contents of every office dragged out beside the elevator. Elements that don’t move a visitor toward something are furniture in the walkway.
- Who asked for it, a user or a department? Both kinds of request arrive with urgency. Only one of them is about the person the page exists for. Be honest about which lobby-shelf requests are actually internal peace treaties.
- If it vanished, who would notice, a customer or a coworker? Coworkers complain for two weeks and recover fully. Customers who can’t find their path don’t complain at all. They just leave, quietly, and the analytics writes their little obituary.
Run honestly, these four questions clear most of the drawer. What survives is almost always shorter, calmer, and, awkwardly, more effective for the exact departments that wanted more on it.
One warning: the drawer refills. Entropy is patient, and six months after the cleanest launch, small reasonable requests start arriving again, one banner at a time, each carrying its own urgent little memo. The four questions aren’t a redesign exercise. They’re a door policy, and a door policy only works if somebody’s still standing at the door in March.
Saying no without saying no
But you don’t win homepage fights with taste arguments. Telling a VP their request “clutters the composition” is how designers lose the war by winning a sentence. You win by offering a better home.
Careers doesn’t need a homepage banner; it needs an actual careers page worth applying through, plus one clear link in the nav. The campaign doesn’t need a hero slot; it needs a landing page where the ads point, which will outperform the hero slot anyway. The award badge can live a long, dignified life on the about page. And the footer, honestly, is where homepage arguments go to be settled, and it does fine work down there.
The trade works because it’s genuinely better for the requester, not just tidier for you. A buried mention in a crowded lobby helps nobody’s numbers. A dedicated page that a motivated visitor can actually find gives each department the thing it really wanted all along, which was never pixels. It was results it could report.
Everything deserves an address. Almost nothing deserves the lobby. Those are different statements, and the second one only sounds harsh until you watch a visitor actually try to use the page.
Because here’s the thing about the drawer: you never fix it by buying a bigger drawer. You fix it by admitting the batteries have a real home, the key opens nothing, and nobody was ever going to use that soy sauce.
Your homepage has soy sauce packets. You already know which ones they are.
