The "home page" dilemma.

I was reading an article published in May 2009 on the fundamentals of web designing when I came across this excerpt:

Pay attention to your homepage. That is what the viewers will first see. The home page should be attractive and provide useful information. If it doesn’t satisfy the mentioned criteria then the readers will move on.

This is a great piece of advice. The home page should be attractive. I like to compare it to my version of one of the most futile sayings out there: “Judge the content by its cover…”. You can have different types of users for a website and some types of users judge more on the eye candy than on the information available. This is where your design gets into the game. Give the eye candy to keep “eye-candied driven traffic” and give the content to the more “content-minded traffic”. However, there seems to be a hiccup somewhere around.

“That is what the viewers will first see.” This is what strikes me. With the evolution of search engines, the complexity of algorithms and all the work around SEO and separation of code and content… does the “home page being the first thing viewers see” hold the line? If I look at the traffic generated by the content of this site or any other site I manage, the home page is not the most viewed page or the most important landing page (therefore not the first) on any of the websites. If your content is well built and optimised (content being the core reason of maintaining a website or blog), each page is evaluated and included in search results.

So, is the home page really the first page that a visitor will see? Should it be the most well designed page in a site? The level of design should be the same for any level of a website and the fact that user habits have changed should be taken into consideration to maximise conversion rates through each page of a website.

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