Here’s one of the defining stories of my web designing journey:

Circa 1998 : One night when working late on a project, the design team decided to order a pizza. We decided to compare pizza websites and see where we should order from. First, we tried Dominos. We didn’t get very far because their server was down or something — maybe they didn’t develop for Mac browsers at the time. Next we tried PizzaHut. After having to sit through a 2-3 minute Flash movie with no skip button, we finally got to a site that informaed me all about the company but had no content about actually how to get a pizza. Finally we tried PapaJohns (it’s always the 3rd one, isn’t it?).

There, in the middle of the page, was an “Order Pizza Online” button. Epiphany! Get the pizza to the people! Now this was back in the 90s and I know their sites have changed since but PapaJohns got our business that day.

I also know that this idea can be taken too far the other direction. Businesses tend to cram as much applicable content onto the homepage that it becomes useless to everyone. Remember your priority users, the top 5 tasks they perform, and give people easy channels to navigate to the right page to accomplish their not-quite-as-important tasks.