I agree with your line of thought, but instead of killing homepages, I am thinking our homepages need to be more like our landing pages - in fact we should consider it as a landing page - it mostly is the biggest as far as traffic goes.

Thanks Gemusil.

I like your point that perhaps homepages are the most important landing page.

But for many websites should a design goal be to send as many visitors as possible to a landing page targeting them, their segment, their ad, their location etc.? In that case, the 1 main homepage should be accessed by as few people as possible, no?

Then in an ideal site where landing pages are used, who sees the ‘homepage?’ even if someone just types in your URL and accesses it directly, I probably want them to see a landing page not a homepage, don’t I?

I have started to view home page as a hotel concierge - being able to answer the question in their mind at the time of clicking and direct people to the right landing page

The real question is not about purpose of your homepage, but about purpose of your website, i think.