If you have ever participated in the development of a new website, one of the most debated issues is the design of the front page. I have observed bitter disagreements among peers about what should or should not appear on the front page of a website. The front page gets a ton of attention in the development of a new site because of the assumption that it is the only place where you can show a visitor all the paths available to them. The problem is, this thinking isn’t necessary anymore.

Which would you rather have, one front page to your website or 200? Would you rather have one place for people to go to learn more about you or dozens (or thousands)?

In the new web order, the front page is increasingly unnecessary. It’s not dead. It’s just not as important as it used to be. Here’s why: search results are driving people inside websites. Every page within your site could (and should) be a highly specific front door to the site.

Why I Love Blogs
This is one reason I love blogs as a web presence. Every single blog post is a hook in search engine waters that stands alone. For instance, when someone searches for the phrase “social media Nashville,” a series of blog posts from my blog are the second most popular result.  Or take a post I wrote about how to use icons in Twitter. A search on the phrase “Twitter characters” has this post as the second result.

All of this is just a sample of front doors to my site via search. This doesn’t include other blogs and websites that link to specific posts. Each one of those references from other sites creates even more front doors…front doors I didn’t create, but that were created for me.

The bottom line is that every post creates a new front door to the site that didn’t exist before. If you needed any other reason to start a blog, this is it.

I have been blogging for just over three years and have over 550 blog posts. That’s 550 different ways for people to find out about me. That’s over 550 front doors to MicroExplosion.com. That’s where I want my time and energy spent. Not fussing about one big front door, but creating hundreds and hundreds of smaller front doors for the kind of people I hope to reach anyway.

For a few weeks now I’ve noticed a few people on Twitter will throw in a little icon or image into their Tweets to convey an idea beyond the 140 character limit. At first I just thought it was a secret keystroke or maybe something people on Macs could do, or something else that I was clearly out of the loop on. As I’ve seen a few more people do it I had to get to the bottom of it so after a little research I found the source of these new little pictures embedded in Tweets.

It turns out some guys developed a little tool called TwitterKeys that lets you include all kinds of images in your Tweets. So if you ever wanted to add some wingdings or webdings or icons or little pictures to your Twitter messages then TwitterKeys is for you. I only have one request: use them sparingly. The cool factor is sure to wear off so don’t use them just because you can, use them because they help you say what you were going to say anyway…only shorter.