signor_john - 5:04 pm on Dec 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

I think the definition of a "perfect home page " depends on the nature of the site.

For a relatively static site, Tedster's "Where am I?" "What can I do here?" works well.

For a news site, a busier layout with time-sensitive headlines, news stories, etc. is likely to make more sense.

Another consideration is how users get to the home page. Are they arriving from other pages within the site that they've reached through search? Or are they typing in a familiar URL, such as "www.example.com," and using it as a gateway to the site's content?

I agree, by the way, that too many sites use off-the-shelf Joomla, Drupal, etc. templates (or, in some cases, WordPress or Movable Type blog templates) that aren't appropriate for what their sites are trying to do. It may be easy to just take a stock multicolumn, multistory or multipost template and replace the Greek type with whatever you can find to fill the spaces, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.