The Virtues of the Simple Home Page

The good folks over at Vitamin have written another useful and insightful article about Web application design, this one talking about the nightmare that can become the home page.

A couple of key points:

• Less is more. I cannot stress this enough. Their example of the Apple home page is good, but Google is an even better example. Part of the reason Google attained such dominance in the search industry is because their home page is simple: a search box with a minimum of fuss. People like simple. Believe you me, I do understand how clients will want to cram as much information on to the home page as possible (if you ever saw some of my earlier site designs, you'd know I was a perpetrator of this crime). But less is always more — you point out what's truly important by not dumping everything you think is important on to the home page.
• I really like the idea of designing the "interior" pages first. This makes a lot of sense in that it gets the client to think about the application (or site) as a whole, and not spend all their energy on the home page and then not have any time to spend where it really counts: focusing on how people use the internals of the app.
• If you don't believe people enter Web sites via pages other than the home page, I guess you haven't heard of bookmarks.