homepage

🏠

Your homepage represents you on the web, typically at the top of your domain, with your name and an iconic representation, often marked up with h-card, and fairly commonly one or more streams of recent, topical, or most relevant posts marked up with h-entry.

For work on the IndieWeb.org homepage itself, see:

site-homepage

Why

All the reasons why and more.

Use your own personal domain to own your identity on the web.

By making your homepage more useful, you will feel more motivated to share your URL instead of just your Twitter handle or other social media profile.

How

What should be on your indie web site home page?

About You

Your homepage should have some basic information about you:

name
icon / profile photo
tagline / bio
communication links (aim: mailto: tel: etc. see [1] for some UI brainstorming on this)
other about / contact information, e.g.
- Links to silo profile URLs, approximate location, short bio, categories/tags
marked up with h-card (see Indiewebify.me to verify, validate)
web-sign-in support
- rel-me links to your other identities on the web

Your home page is the URL you share with people, therefore it's useful to set it up with:

role - brief summary of what it is you do
discovery of what else you have on your site
Your local time
Last seen (last checkin/location post)
upcoming events
projects
disclosure - disclosures of various types, e.g. cookies or analytics tracking

Stream

Main article: personal feed

Next, it's quite popular to have:

stream of your most recent posts and other activities.

See the Stream of Updates examples below for some inspiration.

Archive Navigation

If you show a stream of recent posts on your home page, it may also be useful to show a small navigation interface for your archives.

More: archive navigation.

Previously

Among early 2000s bloggers it was popular to also have on your home page:

blogroll

IndieWeb Examples

Contact Homepages

Some interesting homepage examples of simple contact/about information, maps for location, live IM status etc.

bear: https://bear.im/ has an h-card and links to his h-feed and a more substantive About page in the sidebar
http://scottbullard.com/ - hCard phone/email links with more: http://scottbullard.com/more.html
http://www.jaredhanson.net/ - live IM status on Jared's hCard
http://npdoty.name/ - hCard with map as background centered on his current location
http://ebdesign.se/ about, elsewhere, and most recent blog post
old adactio.com (pre-2012)

Stream of Updates

Main article: personal_feed#IndieWeb_Examples

All that and most of the content they post online as a stream:

Mixed/composite feed examples with complete posts:

https://tantek.com/ (2010 onward, previously redirected at times to month permalinks 2002-2008)
https://adactio.com/ (late 2012+)
https://aaronparecki.com/ (2016+)

See personal_feed#IndieWeb_Examples for more examples.

Other Examples

Some interesting personal create home page examples that are not in clear categories:

http://jasonpark.me/ - Requires JS, then shows a presentation made to look like graphically browsing a computer filesystem
https://www.gwern.net/

Homepage Brainstorming

Things which could go on homepages which aren’t currently implemented, or are underimplemented. Sometimes there is an intent to implement.

payment links/buttons
local weather/daylight (extra context)
people I’ve mentioned recently
tags I’ve used recently
actions like subscribe, contact, add to address book
latest comments
“live” banner image/gallery made from recent posts tagged with #banner or similar, to show off recent photo highlights without requiring a separate UI to manage it

I might be adding links to /me (my profile page) and /about (about the site, license info, powered by, hosted at, etc.) to my homepage. --Sandeep Shetty

Signed-in Features

When signed-in to your own site, it might be useful to have:

reader - integrated reader showing posts from others you follow
- silo examples of such a logged in home page: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr - logged in dashboard

It may also be interesting to change your homepage for visitors who have signed in (/and are in your contact list etc)

Showing replies, likes and other posts not usually shown on a homepage feed for signed-in viewers

Sketches

I did some homepage sketches/brainstorming here --Waterpigs.co.uk 14:32, 18 June 2013 (PDT)

Webmention to homepage

Webmentions sent directly to home pages could serve a number of use-cases:

notification of a person-mention (like an indieweb @-mention) on a post somewhere else
invitation to an indie event
notification of a new private message received
allowing other people to tag you in photos or posts

Silo Examples

Silos don't technically give you access to their home page, but they do typically provide you with something resembling a home page, albeit typically at a path (not at the root), and they call it a profile. Though they really should be providing subdomains instead of profile paths.

Twitter

As an example, Twitter let's you customize your profile page with:

icon - upload (min/max resolution/bytes?)
header image - upload (min/max resolution/bytes?)
bio - 160 character text field, @ and # auto-linked.
website - auto-linked URL
location - ??? character text field.

Articles

Articles and posts about homepage design and features:

2013-12-04 Tantek Çelik: Toward A People Focused Mobile Communication Experience
...

Related Sessions

2012/UK/Demos - specifically, General discussion / UX thoughts.

Why

How