Bare Naked App kindly pointed out that Skype's home page is one of the most compelling, well written homepages ever created. They properly target their audience, make the site fun, easy-to-learn and hard to resist. And, to top it off, the video walkthrough of Skype's service is pretty phenomenal, too.

What can we take away from the lessons of Skype and other extraordinary home pages?

• Know your audience - if you have a product or service that needs no introduction (think Gap, Nordstrom, DisneyWorld, etc.), don't introduce - create desire.
• Make sure your imagery, graphics and layout are commensurate with the brand space you want to inhabit. Are you Kia (affordable, reliable, better-than-before) or the Cadillac (upscale, statement-making and expensive).
• Keep it Simple - the home page can't be everything to everyone, but by providing navigation that serves most of the new visitors and makes it easy for returning visitors to find what they need, you server both audiences effectively. Converting a new visitor is far more difficult than retaining a returning user so make sure you put the appropriate effort into each.

I also really liked some of the copy-writing advice given by BNA:

Trim your sentences to get your message across in the quickest way possible. Adding more words doesn’t make you sound clever and it certainly doesn’t make your app better so again leave them out. A couple of examples of this are:

What you write - What you should write

At the present time - Now
Provided that - If
Owing to the fact that - Because
In order to - To
The majority of - Most...

Some folks are already doing a great job in this arena:

• http://technorati.com/
• http://www.last.fm/
• http://www.zillow.com/

Some others haven't quite figured it out:

• http://www.linkedin.com/ - rotating messages that aren't clickable, no compelling story on why joining is valuable, no direct login for returning visitors
• http://flickr.com/ - If you don't understand what Flickr is, it's not easy to figure out
• http://www.dell.com/ - They're so ubiquitous, it may be hard to make a case that they're not doing a great job, but I've always been frustrated by the entry page - the segmentation just seems premature and unneccessary.

Your thoughts?