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Hi, Jodi

> In a Windows app ... you start with a blank screen.
> ...
> On the Web ... create a home page that acts as a
>gateway/launch pad to the rest of the application.

Many Windows apps copy the design of Word or Excel and the like. That's why
they start with sort of a blank page. I call those applications "document
editors" after the type of work dome with Word and the like. 
Due to the great influence of those MS products, lots of apps that are not
document editors were forced to adopt that shape. These are the apps that
Alan Cooper call "sovereign", apps that sit in the screen and stay there for
hours.

But not all apps are of this kind. Most business apps are of a kind that I
call "wizards" because they are similar to the Windows wizards in the sense
that they drive the user thru a series of steps to achieve one specific
goal.  These steps are a sucesion of forms that hopefully get adapted to the
prior forms content to help the user enter the data and to prevent them of
commiting errors.

The "editor" apps tend to offer the user sets of tools while the "wizards"
tend to offer a list of the available wizard programs. This list is called
"menu" and is usual in corporate IT apps.
Most web sites have menus, usually as a column of links to the right of the
window.

These menus are completelly different to those found in the Windows
programs. Windows menus dissapear all the time but tend to be available all
the time too.  Both characteristics are not desirable in most business
applications. A better idea is to let the users look at the available
options all the time the options are available, and to prohibit it's use
when not available simply by not showing them.

If your app will take one form or the other, it depends on it's peculiar
characteristocs and not on the technology it's being implemented with.

Also, you can mix. Starting with a menu, some of the choices are "wizards"
and other are "editors".

Editors are not very suitable for the web since thay imply almost
instantaneous response to user's input, which is not a feature of the
Internet. Instead the design should favour forms that download fast and have
enough data to fill so the user is working more time than waiting.

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