I’ve been talking about home pages and website design this week, but the topics are very old indeed. The cartoon below was from xkcd a few years ago, and was reproduced in the latest edition of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. It’s basically saying that the overlap between what the user wants from a website, and what they’re given on the home page, is often just the name of the site.
Of course, xkcd is seeing a university website from the point of view of past, present and future students, whereas the website manager might deliberately be focusing on selling what they do to prospects. And there’s nothing wrong with that – indeed, it’s probably what you’ll want to do with your site. Just make sure you do have a genuine strategy for what your home page is supposed to be performing.