What did you think I meant?

A couple blog entries ago, I suggested that while most companies think of the “home page” as their entry to their web experience, most people googled their way into a website doing a deep dive to perform a surgical strike and get just what they needed and get out. I’ve started to think about it as planning on having dinner guests come in the front door and having them walk around the house and enter the house near the back porch while they walk past Drew’s toys, chalk, and sticks on their way through the piled-up laundry room into the kitchen etc. It’s just not quite what I envision, ya know?
My point remains, websites need to be come “engaging” in ways that create some reason to stick around or use it as a default home page. Usually companies stick all these good stuff on the flash-driven home page. But I want the website to give me some reason to stick around, to be engaged, and ideally with a site that says it recognizes my reality in some way. Either that I’m already a user, or an advocate, or buyer, or whatever.
And then Google does something that is just beautiful. If you choose a sunset theme for your home page, it will “rise” and “set” according to your time zone, or provide umbrellas virtually if it is raining where you are. This, effectively, makes my experience of the site relevant to my life. That’s engaging. It’s non-intrusive but adds an intelligence or personality to the experience. Which of course, makes me want to affiliate my experience with it.