I know very little about Feng Shui and I’m not sure how I ended up looking at this statement on a web page but as I found out:
In feng shui, the main door to your home is very important. A house with many doors can create chaos with too much chi energy entering and leaving the home. This can impact various areas of your life, including finances, health, career and especially your relationships.
Image via Wikipedia
Naturally, this said a lot to me about what’s going on with a number of the web sites on which I work. Does it say the same to you? Let me explain.
I’m talking about the concept of the home page. This used to be the front door of your web site, the portal through which almost everyone entered. Today, however, almost every page is a home page. Social media have changed forever the notion of that front door, as has search. Hopefully you have users sharing your content through some sort of social linking and that amplification activity brings new users directly to the shared content.
You’ve probably invested some time and resources to make sure that your content is accessible to, and indexed by, search engines as well. I’m willing to bet that if you look in your analytics, you’ll find “entrances” recorded on well over half the pages on your site meaning, of course, that those pages served as the “home page” for that visit. You’ll also find that the percentage of visits to the home page, your front door, in which the home page came first was well under 100 (or even 80). No surprise: this is why we do SEO as well as link building, right?
I raise the issue because just as with Feng Shui, having that many doors can bring chaos if your content folks aren’t optimizing most pages as landing pages from which visits begin. Check the bounce rates on some of your more popular entrance pages – how many users are hitting and leaving, much as the statement above says chi energy will leave a unoptimized home?
Make sense? And don’t hesitate to holler if you need some help with this!
Consult Keith 