The homepage isn’t dead, and it’s not dying anytime soon. How healthy the homepage is, of course, depends on what you do. As [x+1]’s Shergalis points out, for DR purposes, the homepage is certainly less relevant these days. However, for branding purposes, as Wooster of T3 explains, the homepage remains vital. Now, if you’re a content provider, Carrabis nailed it: “How we define homepages needs to change.” (Almost) every page online can be the first entry point for a user, so naturally, “every page is a homepage.” This means every page you publish needs to work towards driving deeper engagement with a reader (think contextually relevant x-promotion). But what about the classic homepage? I like Thorp’s advice: “ask yourself what your homepage should say to the world.” Also, ask where the homepage fits into your business. The reasoning might go: What’s your company’s mission, what strategic goal does the homepage serve in that mission, and (given today’s internet surfing behavior) how can you redesign it (or promote it) to make that happen?

Have a look at the new guardian.co.uk. Look at the homepage. Is there any advertising on it? No, you won't find any. They've effectively stopped all the grubby little efforts of marketers to monetise it. The advertising doesn't appear until you click through to a news page or sector/section page. This is effective in two ways: First, it doesn't interfere with the 'business' end of the site - the homepage - which often distracts viewers from the true essence of what the site is actually about; second, it is refreshing. So, in the case of online newspapers, the homepage is very much alive.

Is the homepage dead? I think that depends on the nature of the business that each particular website is designed to address. But certainly, I think the each page should provide the viewer with every piece of information, or access to every piece of information, that a particular website has to offer and each subsequent page or "street" should also contain somewhere, somehow the same information as each other and a link to every other page so that every single page within a particular site is linked to each other in one way or another. This results in effectively treating every page like a homepage in that no matter where people land within your site, they have access to everything the site has to offer. And yes, the less pages you have, the better.

Interesting article. However, how did I find it? I went to the Home Page of iMedia Connection. How about you? Robert Kadar Good Health Advertising Rob at Good Health Advertising.com

Many useful considerations for site developers and clients to iron out in the process of building an effective site that targets traffic. One of the key messages here is to build from the outside in,, developing content and easy access to information based on the user's needs, This is lterally thinking 'out of the box'..

When was the last time you visited Amazon homepage? They stumbled across this phenomenon years ago and made money proving this principle – up selling and cross selling depending upon my requirements and not expecting me to go on a linear journey. the fact is search engines killed them off before most people realised what a website is. Content is king – the online world is not a photocopy of a brochure online with a nice cover and content – it is a dynamic organism that should be developed around “me - the user”. Personalisation of homepages or jump points are now on the desktop – whether using “Today” in MSN Messenger to get a quick overview of stories and my mail, or whether it is desktop widgets and gadgets as proven by Vista, the question is not so much is the homepage dead, but are websites dead? Best not tell any clients this – after all they are still justifying online by ‘click thru’…

I agree with the article to a large extent. Today the homepage has become seemingly less anchor like. Entry points are being defined by value each word of content generates for the viewer. With sections and subsctions gaining access across the website it has made the website into a collection of homepage like pages.

It's a great question, given that the web world has shifted and there is such a focus on search and video and other entry points. My sense is that web professionals and design folks get it, but the decision makers in corporate America still have a traditional view of how the web works, or should work in their typically 'ordered way'. However, Web 2.0 is proving how dynamic and regularly chaotic the web can be.