Last week, HP finally launched the corporate Website home page it had been testing for the past couple of months. We saw a sample of this page in action in February, but there’s nothing like driving the real thing to see the method behind this new page.

As for reactions, HP.com’s new home page has already garnered its share of opinions, including a tepid thumbs down from Daya Baran in her WebGuild blog http://www.webguild.org/2008/04/hp-redesigns-homepage-and-misses-mark.php. I’ve also been privy to some side chatter among Web managers who feel that this new design is a bit too edgy for tech users—and for HP’s brand.

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom. Here’s why.

First, let’s talk about what HP’s Website needs to accomplish. Unlike most corporate venues that promote a handful of offerings or target a narrow set of markets, the HP site markets and supports over 10,000 products optimized for different audiences. These range from consumers to small businesses to sophisticated enterprises. Add in a dash of public sector buyers (government, health, and education) for good measure, and you begin to realize the challenges HP.com faces. It has to organize, rationalize, and direct traffic to more products for more audiences than any other site on the IT Web.

From a big picture perspective, the HP.com home page needs to achieve at least five key objectives (in no particular order).

1. Promote the company’s brand(s), current promotions, thought leadership, and highlight the company’s long history of innovation.
2. Provide access to corporate-class information, including news & announcements, corporate & investor information, events, and jobs.
3. Allow visitors to enter the site based on simple product and services paths (still the most popular visitor path for all of the IT sites we study).
4. Provide quick links to HP support & drivers—two of the primary uses of this site.
5. Encourage visitors to explore products & services based on their need or affiliation. In HP’s world that ranges between consumer and business segments, plus promoting printer-centric activities that consume printer ink—HP’s monster cash cow.

When you look at the new HP.com home page, it’s obvious that it is accomplishing all of these objectives—and then some—in an astonishingly small space.

The revolving features allow HP to highlight current promotions and communicate the company’s thought leadership and innovation messages. Here, the HP.com team has paid proper attention to providing controls that allow visitors to step through these vignettes and each includes a prominent link to explore more information. As important, these vignettes are notable for a new first-person-class marketing voice.

Deftly-placed navigation panels allow visitors to begin their journey into the site based on their affiliation (consumer, business, public sector) or the task they want to achieve (shop for products, get support, create a project). Instead of dumping users to overstuffed gateway pages, clean & concise interactive panels serve the same purpose—and allow visitors to cut to the chase right from the home page. Best of all, HP.com’s savvy use of accordion navigation techniques allows users to quickly explore all of their options on these interactive gateway pages. If they don’t have the required plug-in, accordion action is replaced with simple fly-out menus.

My Bottom Line

When you map HP.com’s new home page against the five key objectives it needs to achieve, there’s no doubt that it hits a well deserved home run—and brings some very interesting new ideas (such as interactive gateway pages) to the party. Is it different? To be sure. Does it align with current IT industry norms? Not even close. In fact, among the top IT sites we study, only IBM.com has a home page in the same league.

And what about the comments we hear about HP.com’s startling black background, news ticker and corporate links that fall under the fold (who cares?), and that pesky home page icon? In the final analysis, these eye candy nits will fade as visitors adapt to this new design. The real issue, in my mind, is how quickly HP will be able to translate the best of its new behaviors into the zones that lie behind its home page. In the final analysis, having great curb appeal is one way to get buyers up the driveway. To close the deal, however, you have to clean up the house.

The New HP.com Home Page in Action