I have been thinking about the "Home Page" a lot lately, I think it's a loaded term.
When you think about a house in terms of doorways/entrances you typically think of the front door and the back door. So when people start off a user scenario with "Home Page" in a large scale commercial website, it implies that all traffic comes in through your home page and leaves your site through a conversion.
In reality commercial websites are like sports arenas; people enter the site from all over the place. A lot of time is spent fretting over a user’s path that starts at the top of your site map and ends in conversion. It’s a natural assumption; you and your peers built a site so users would follow that path.
The problem is you don't control where search engines and external websites place users in your site. If you dig into your analytics you might be surprised to find your home page didn't even crack the top ten entry pages.
Once you know your entry pages, you might realize that these pages can be tweaked to make users want to stick around the site a little bit longer. That's the start to finding the real golden path for your website. Go find those top 5 entry pages, show the analytics to anyone who will listen, that's where you and your team need to spend time fretting! Also if you haven't read Avinash Kaushik blog post about bounce rate do yourself a favor and check it out, it could make you look like an analytics rock star.
To be clear I am not saying that a good "Home Page" is waste of time. A good home page is very important, especially if you are just starting out. If you can't explain the primary purpose of your site and its value to a consumer on the first page, well, you probably have a much larger problem.
So now that I put it out there, what would I replace "Home Page" with?
How about Front Gate, Root Page, or Main Page
Ya I know those suck too...
