[Sigia-l] the purpose of a homepage

[mfg345 at aol.com]

I was recently having some internal debate with my co-workers about the 
purpose of the homepage in light of metrics showing that most visitors 
to our site (upscale shopping) don't click on links within the homepage 
content, rather using the navigation and search. This was also 
reinforced by a recent usability test in which users did not read the 
homepage for any of the tasks.

The debate revolved around whether the homepage was failing because 
people weren't using it, or that if users were finding their way to 
content it didn't matter how they did it.

Does homepage content need to be clicked on in order for the page to be 
successful (especially for a very strongly branded company)? What is 
the tradeoff between creating more engaging homepage content vs. 
filtering users directly into the site more quickly? Is there any 
research or benchmarking on homepage clickthrough rates for links in 
content vs. links in navigation, and comparisons for conversion rates 
between the two?

 Thanks,
  Michael