Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Show me where to start.
There’s nothing worse than encountering a
new Home page and having no idea where to begin.
Establish credibility and trust.
For some visitors, the Home page
will be the only chance your site gets to create a good impression.
And you have to do it...blindfolded
As if that wasn’t daunting enough, it all has to be done under adverse
conditions. Some of the usual constraints:
Everybody wants a piece of it.
Since it’s likely to be the page seen by
more visitors than any other—and the only page some visitors will see
—things that are prominently promoted on the Home page tend to get
significantly greater traffic.
As a result, the Home page is the waterfront property of the Web: It’s
the most desirable real estate, and there’s a very limited supply.
Everybody who has a stake in the site wants a promo or a link to their
section on the Home page, and the turf battles for Home page visibility
can be fierce. Sometimes when I look at a Home page, I feel like the
boy in 
The Sixth Sense
: “I see stakeholders.”

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“University Website” | xkcd.com
The result of design by stakeholders.
The Venn diagram isn’t entirely accurate: Some university sites don’t have
the full name of the school on the Home page.
And given the tendency of most users to scan down the page just far
enough to find an interesting link, the comparatively small amount of
space “above the fold” on the Home page is the 
choice
waterfront
property, even more fiercely fought over.
Too many cooks.
Because the Home page is so important, it’s the one
page that everybody (even the CEO) has an opinion about.
One size fits all.
Unlike lower-level pages, the Home page has to
appeal to everyone who visits the site, no matter how diverse their
interests.

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