The vast majority of people who come to the TidBITS Talk site are experienced TidBITS readers. The talk.tidbits.com site gets many fewer hits than the main tidbits.com site from search engines. So I’m not too concerned about someone actually being confused—especially since every comment thread starts with a link back to the actual article.
I’m not a big fan of the word “Home” for the main page of a website. It is considered a homepage, but you’d never see Apple putting a link to “Apple Home” or even “Home” on apple.com. It’s like using the word “Click here” under a link—mid-90s awkwardness.
Clicking the TidBITS Talk graphic takes you to the front page of the TidBITS Talk website, which is the convention for how to get to the top level of a website. If there’s a “TidBITS Home” link next to it, it just feels awkward, both from the repetition of “TidBITS Talk” and “TidBITS Home” (in different styles) and because no one who’s not already familiar with TidBITS would understand the difference.
No, it’s a weird artifact that I noticed too. I assume our developer did some hand-coding of the CSS for those menus, so I’m getting him to fix that.
I think someone has already noted in a talk thread about being confused, and I will say that I was confused about which link led me to the front page (as I was confused about how to find TidBITS-talk when it was buried in a menu)
Apple’s front page is sleek, but not that usable. Clicking the apple logo on their front page takes you to the front page but it’s not particularly obvious. I find that sacrifice of discoverability in favor of cleanness to be frustrating and mostly ends with me randomly clicking things until I get where I need to go (and then having to remember the permutations of each web site)
