A couple of weeks ago I started a poll about having your logo link to your home page. So far, ninety-three percent have said they expect it to link to your home page. Well after taking a few days break from reviewing sites my first one gave me another reason to why linking to your home page with your logo is a good idea. When the menu fails, for whatever reasons, the visitor can at least get back to the home page.

Menu Failed, Logo Saved

Getting back to the grind, my first site to review was this insurance quotes site. Flipping through the site looking for things that need work, I found something interesting about their menu. They had the home page link in the center of the menu, or at least so I thought.

When I first saw the menu, without clicking anything I began thinking how unusual that was to have the home page link between other items. It turned out, silly me, that it was a link to their home insurance page. So how the heck do I get back to the home page? Well this was the case where the menu had failed, but by good fortune, they linked their logo to the home page. I was able to navigate back, and start over.

It’s What Visitors Expect

I believe it was Jakob Nielsen that coined the phrase or concept anyhow, that visitors to your website spend most of their time on other sites besides yours. The lesson here is that it can’t hurt to include design techniques used by other popular websites. It’s what people are used to, and doing something like linking to your home page with your logo could be a life saver for your site. It’s what visitors expect.