Homepage – How critical is it?

Recently I came across a friend who wanted to make a good looking homepage and putting all their promotions and one of the main lead generation links only on the homepage. Since the beginning of the internet the homepage of the site has been considered the most important page of the site. Till recently, that truly was the case. Visitors entered the site mainly through the homepage; it was the main entry to the site. A good looking homepage was considered the key to the success of the site.

Fyi...visitor’s behaviors have changed; your homepage is no longer the only entry page into the site. Visitors enter from all sort of different pages and not just the homepage. Homepage is still an important page but not as critical as you might think. Look into the data provided by your web analytics tool before you start changing the homepage in a hope that once the page looks cool everything will be fine. Pretty simple process but a lot of people ignore it.

These days users don't have time to look around. Days of web surfing are long over. Users are generally looking for some specific information/product and once they find it, they come to the site, get the content/product... etc from the site and are gone from the site without checking the homepage.

Below are some of the factors that cause users to bypass the home page.
1. Search Engines – Visitors, now more than ever, rely on the search engines to find the sites or pages which are relevant to what they are looking for. Search engines link into internal pages not just home page, at least that’s the case for well search engine optimized sites.

2. Viral Marketing – Friends referring friends to internal page of the site.

3. Bookmarks – Visitors are book marking the internal pages which have content/products which interest them and then use these bookmarks to visit the site again.

4. Deep linking referrals – Other sites, blogs etc. are linking to the internal pages with content/products relevant to their content.

I am not saying that you should not have a nice homepage (people do judge the book by the cover, if they see the cover). Focusing just on the homepage is not a smart idea. Your critical promotions and conversion processes should be easily accessible from the top traffic and entry pages, if not all the pages.

As always, I would like to hear your point of view and the stories that you might be willing to share.