explorador - 5:39 pm on Dec 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Home page and "inside-little-home-pages-like" as for the internal pages. My opinion is:

On a rich content site most of the traffic goes into internal pages (the first page people see jumping form SE's) so every internal page must have features of homepage, mostly to tell people where they are, what to expect and how to browse around.

The homepage as an entry page is mostly visited by direct input (business cards, informal marketing, word of mouth and when people just hear about your site). Sure it matters how you organize it.

In my personal experience the home page is very visited by returning visitors to see recent content (just like RSS feed) and depending on the website, is a valuable piece when it comes to your content-publications = clients, who want to stay on the "cover" for a certain amount of time.

I think the most valuable thing on the sites is navigation and how you implement this on your pages. It all depends on your market. I have many returning visitors to some sites having RSS but some people just wont use the RSS. I bet the homepage look and behavior of the visitors depends from market to market and niche.