Clean & fresh VS crammed with content

[newbieWeber]

So, is it better to have the homepage of a new website clean & clear like the one at www.mywebcapsule.com, or crammed with content to keep users sucked in straight away?

Does it really make a difference?

Thanks

[mark87]

Depends really on the look and feel of the site... crammed = generally bad, but lots of content = often good.

It's more about styling it so that it's usable (an easy-to-read font size and padding etc helps).

[felgall]

People seeing your home page will make their decision on whether to stay on your site based on their first impression of what they see.

Anything that they need to scroll to see is effectively not there until after you have convinced them to stay.

If the page takes too long to load they will leave before it finishes loading.

If they can't tell just by glancing at the page what it is about then they are unlikely to look closer.

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

What I do sometimes is a 5 second test. Give the url to a friend and ask them to view the first page for 5 seconds. After the 5 seconds ask them what they remembered. The things they write down will help you decide what you need to work on. For example you may want people to notice the content first but they wrote down the content as something they remembered further down the list.