: What's the correct terminology when referring to the “home” page when logged in and logged out? Struggling with some terminology here. Let's use Twitter as an example. If you are logged in,

@Ogunnowo487

I've never come across any specific/official terminology to refer to the different pages. To the end user they are usually seen as the same page - the same URL - the home page.

In generic terms, the "home page when logged out" could perhaps be shortened to the "default home page" or "logged out home page" (when there is a distinct difference).

The "home page when logged in" could be referred to as the "logged in home page" or "authorised home page".

I think my favourites would be "default home page" and "authorised home page" respectively.

If this is for your own internal use, as you suggest in comments, then the important thing is to decide on a convention and stick to it. homeDefault and homeAuth perhaps?

In my opinion, a site could have multiple index and landing pages, but only one home. So only home should be used to identify this page IMO.

Twitter

The homeDefault page shows the full login/register page.

The homeAuth page shows the authorised users twitter feed.

These are indeed very different pages and both accessed via the same URL (no redirection).



(DISCLAIMER: Based more on my own opinion rather than anything authoritative.)

Vote Up Vote Down

@Odierno851

In my opinion the home page/front page is the master key of the website. The home page should be where the user start and go back to access to all the ramifications of the website (which are not necessarily always available to the user on any page).

For sites that require log-in to allow access to the content:

The home page is the first page the user see after he logged in.
The page before should be referred as the sign-in/register page (page with very limited features - website description - logo - log-in box in most of the cases are what the user see.)
The log-out page is a redirection to the log-in page.

For sites that do not require log-in:

Most of the content is already available to the user even w/o registration so the home page should be the first page of the site, with a link or a module on the front-page allowing to sign-in to get advanced features.
A log-out should bring the user to the home page while the log-in could be handled in different ways: The user may be redirected to a log-in page with user profile/info/stat could be displayed, or the home page could be reloaded with advanced menus/features etc

That's more or less the scenarios I have in mind.
Have fun :)

Vote Up Vote Down