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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27869
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27869
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That approach is fine for a landing page. But what you have to bear in mind is that people don't use landing pages. This is true across all categories of information. There has been a steady decline in reader's use of landing page across all categories of information. Gerry McGovern charts the decline here: [http://gerrymcgovern.com/the-continued-decline-of-the-homepage/](http://gerrymcgovern.com/the-continued-decline-of-the-homepage/)

This does not mean you should not have a landing page. Their use has declined radically, but it has not been extinguished altogether. But it does mean that you can't rely on a landing page as the core of your navigational strategy.

The reason people don't use landing page anymore is that they have learned that it is easier to just search for what they want. Most of your users will start by searching Google (which is why putting your information behind a login is a bad idea). If they don't give up after the Google search fails, and log in to your site, they will go straight to the search bar and type the same query in there.

This is a problem, because your site search is much much worse at this stuff than Google. That is because search is a big data problem, and your sight search see several orders of magnitude less data than Google. So, it is not going to rank results as well as Google. That puts a lot of pressure on the topics that do turn up at the top of your search. If they are not the topics that the reader needs, they better provide links to those topics or the reader is not going to be able to find them.

Secondly, because the reader starts with a search, they arrive at an individual topic. Every page in your documentation set is a potential landing page, and every one of them needs to be written to work as one. This is a design principle I call Every Page is Page One, and I wrote a book about it: [http://xmlpress.net/publications/eppo/](http://xmlpress.net/publications/eppo/)

In an Every Page is Page One world, how you write the individual topics, and how you link them too each other, is more important than how you design the overall navigation. Overall navigation is still an important thing to think about, but it does nothing to solve the navigation problem for the typical users whose information seeking approach is to do a search, find something likely looking in the search results, and then follow links if they have to.

Original score: 4