This is a bit old - you may or may not notice the date on this post but it's over a year old. That doesn't mean it's not useful but we all know how fast things chance on the web so there's a chance that techniques and technologies described here could be a little dated.

The homepage is alive and kicking

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To be honest I’ve never written an article as a response to some others I’ve read but I’ve heard recently that the homepage is dead! –

http://www.drawar.com/articles/are-homepages-dead-or-are-we-missing-the-boat/69/

http://feedusblog.com/detail.asp?c=614967

Yep your good old index.php or whatever you use isn’t any good any more, it’s been killed by social media, ad-words and deep linking dropping people right into the belly of your website.
So I doubt you’re all going to delete your homepage and leave users with nothing at the top of your website are you? I thought not, which is exactly why the homepage is alive and kicking.

People know how websites work
Which is the primary reason that your homepage won’t die and as such your homepage will always be a point of reference for people – it’s a starting point. If someone wants to go back to square one what do they do? They go to the homepage and they start over. Having been dropped into the middle of your site most people will know that they can just head up to the top of your domain and they will be back to square one.

Repeat visitors
This is another group who are going to use your homepage a lot. When you want to go to an article on say Six Revisions you don’t reel off the full URL from the top of your head do you? Nope – you go to http://www.sixrevisions.com and then go off to find it from there.

This can also be the case with people who arrive at your site from offline advertising, business cards, posters etc. They’re all still going to land on your homepage.

It’s just changed – or has it?
So we all know your homepage isn’t going away and both the writers of the articles above know it isn’t, (ok so if you read the full article they don’t say it’s going away completely either). Your homepage is essentially a contents page, a highlights of the site. Whether that be most recent content, most popular content or just the content you want people to read it is still relevant.
And in essence that’s what it always has been so while people may be landing further into your site they’ll still want to use your homepage and you’ll still need to tailor it in such a way that it helps people get deeper into the site to the content they want to read.