Website homepage builds up reader loyalty
It was only a couple months ago that Quartz was making a bold proclamation: “The homepage is dead, and the social web has won.” The behavior of news consumers online was shifting rapidly away from the old way — going to a news site’s homepage, looking for an article that interests you — to one fueled by the streams of links found in social media.
This argument wasn’t a new one for Quartz, which launched two years ago without a traditional homepage. Type qz.com into your browser and you’d be thrown directly into the site’s top story. Rather than the usual back-and-forth of website navigation — homepage, click, back arrow, click again, back arrow — Quartz wanted you to scroll from story to story.
So if you went to qz.com yesterday morning, you could be forgiven for being confused. With a new redesign that launched late Sunday, Quartz has gone retro and built an actual homepage. And they did it for the reason just about every other news site has a homepage — to build up reader loyalty.