Damn, now that is a big image. Scroll, scroll, scroll...

Most if not all of the new WordPress themes out there seem to have the same obsession these days: massive images that fill the entire top 1/3rd of the website’s home page in both height and width, taking up the entire fold of the computer screen. Regardless if the images show some kind of Flash, HTML5 or jQuery special effect, they’re forcing users to scroll down to get to the articles or other tidbits that would best be seen at the very top.

While these graphics — regardless if you call them “billboards” or “hero areas” — serve the purpose of highlighting a specific article or page, they’re essentially limiting your prime space (the upper-middle-center region of the website) just to that article. So, if that niche article isn’t of interest to the majority of your viewers, you might experience more dropouts. Don’t forget how low the attention span of the average internet user is.

As for the images themselves, even if you were a total advocate of the “massive billboard,” you better be doing a much more strategic job than by simply picking out some royalty-free stock image and sticking it in that huge space, or you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. What’s even worse are webmasters who never swap out the image over time, creating “graphic blindness” to it and magnifying the impression that the site is never updated.

Who Uses Massive Images In the Real World?

Nobody. I actually can’t find a single credible website out there that is filling the top third of their home page with a graphic. Well, maybe except for Apple.com and iTunes.com, but they’re truly the exception.

Retail giants like eBay and Amazon use front page images, but they’re complimented by navigation. CNN and Fox News, both major news sites, don’t use massive call-outs either. I think I’ll follow their lead, since they’re successful sites.

Where the Huge Billboard Works

Got a mini-site advertising one single product or service, such as a software package? That large banner could be incredibly useful since there’s no other focus of the site. Use it to show off the product, and transition amongst a handful of the site’s inner-pages that take users through features, videos or anything else that ends up with the “Buy Now” button.

If your site showcases your portfolio, the huge image tactic works for obvious reasons – it’s your work that you’re highlighting, and nothing does a better job than that.

Where It Doesn’t Work…and What To Do

Instead of filling a screen with an image, how about a simple 125×125 thumbnail box highlighting your feature article, with a list of previous featured articles? Or a much smaller, more practical “slider” that sets a user down a path, ultimately helping them follow a logical path? I think the trick here is to provide something eye-appealing and helpful, while also giving other alternatives. Giving your visitor more options at first glance can only be a good thing.

One more important point – note that your billboard-heavy website is probably filling up iPhone and Droid screens, too. Skipping past those jQuery transitions is far more annoying on a mobile device than it is on a desktop.

I suppose the most frustrating part of WordPress themes that implement these over-sized images is that most of the themes themselves are beautiful works of art. If worse comes to worse, simply remove the coding of the jQuery slider from the home page altogether, and you’ll have a decent theme framework to play with (and a hell of a lot more space and opportunity!)

If you’re using WordPress as a CMS or a substitute for heavyweight platforms like Joomla, you’ll notice one pretty bad flaw: the linking structure. It’s all due to one simple, stupid reason – pages are named “mysite.com/page“, and posts are named “mysite.com/category/post“. Nowhere in between can you backtrack a post to a page, nor can you create a truly structured site hierarchy because of those truly worthless WordPress categories. Let me explain…

Understanding WordPress Categories

What is a WordPress category? Basically, it’s a page you can visit that lists every single post within it. It truly makes no sense to me, UNLESS we’re talking about blogs. But, for WordPress driven storefronts, affiliate stores and whatever other project you are trying to create, it’s a glass ceiling. Let me illustrate with a little case study:

• I create a store for office supplies using WordPress and ePN (eBay Partner Network) using the PHPbay plugin.
• I start off creating the home pages, and categories for writing utensils and computer peripherals. I add 50 products to each of those two categories, totaling 100 individual product pages. Those pages branch down further into deeper pages for ‘brand name writing utensils’ and ‘brand name computer peripherals.’
• I install a breadcrumb plugin for my WordPress affiliate site, only to see that something is very wrong. The site will not backtrack from home page, to main product category to the subcategory to the product page, like this: mysite.com/writing-utensils/pens/bic. It dawns on you that “writing-utensils,” as in “mysite.com/writing-utensils,” does not even exist!  The whole second level of that URL is in limbo.

Why WordPress Pages Ruin Site Structure

That “second level” position is reserved for WordPress Pages, only – not WordPress categories or posts. Don’t even think of cheating by creating a WordPress Page named “../writing-utensils,” it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum. Well, not really, but it will probably look like some really strange case of duplicate content, and mess up your XML sitemap and structure. The true address of that second level would be “mysite.com/category/writing-utensils,” even though “/category/” disappears in the actual URL for a deep link. Catch my drift?

This is one extraordinarily frustrating aspect of WordPress. It can be used to create anything, but it always comes down to one simple fact: it was engineered to be blogging software, and that core structure hasn’t been modified in any way to accommodate traditional website hierarchies.

The biggest fix WordPress could implement is to allow us to forfeit WordPress pages completely. They consume the 2nd level of the URL (mysite.com/whatever), which is where the first breadcrumb must reside. That first breadcrumb (in the aforementioned example) should be the “sub-category” or main product page that branches directly off of the home page. Instead, your eCommerce site doesn’t have any main product page. The products awkwardly backtrack to the home page.

There have been attempts to delete Page functionality out of WordPress through the usage of WordPress plugins, but they were deemed to be dangerous, and threatened to seriously screw with the infrastructure of a WordPress build. It’s a total shame. The one functionality, as simple and stupid as it is, cannot be done for WordPress…a platform celebrated for its expandability.

We should only hope that WordPress can reach full CMS status one day, so that its link structure doesn’t have to conform to Posts and Pages; rather, all content within a WordPress site should flow directly from home page to landing page.

Sure, there are people running successful WordPress-driven eCommerce sites. Perhaps I’m a little sore at the fact that sites built in WordPress can’t use sexy urls like “watches.com/timex” because the next two levels in from that page would eliminate /timex/ and replace it with /category/, making it impossible to ever share that link. However…that, to me, is a big flaw.

I’m going to chalk this up as stupidity on my part – I should have known that WordPress has left those links as “dofollow,” and I should have either coded in the rel=nofollow myself, or looked for the plugin. All I can do now is remedy this issue, ping, and hope for the best. I’m not even going to complain about how horribly boneheaded, stupid, ridiculous and careless WordPress was for not at least giving us a “nofollow” check box option for our blogroll.

If you’ve stumbled upon this post looking for a WordPress plugin that converts the blogroll to “nofollow” links, here you go.

I always tend to learn lessons the hard way, anyway :/