Redesigning website - homepage or no homepage?

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Dustin_m

Member
I'm going to be working on redesigning my photography site over the next few weeks and would like some opinions on what you all prefer when visiting a site like mine (photo/art/design/etc).

I've been going back and forth on whether I should have visitors land on an actual home page or simplify it and just have the blog or portfolios be my home page. What do you think? On one hand, I think that having a very simple homepage that brings up a random image from within my portfolios would be nice. On the other hand, having them land on my blog page to see links to latest image sets or any updates/specials/etc would be useful too.

My main goal and reason for doing this is that I want to work towards some paid gigs with my photography, and to have a clean site design that lets my photos stand on their own when I show it to a potential client. I started a Blogger blog today and a Fb page for my photography as well. The blog will get integrated into a page on my site, and the Fb page will be mainly for marketing and will probably be shown on the blog as well. I'll use a Flickr acct to hold sets of photos to go to SimpleViewer to post new sets on the blog.

Other than that part, the content layout will be similar to my current site as far as the Portfolios, Store, Contact, and About pages are concerned. Going to an all white design which I feel is a lot cleaner looking, tired of the dark background. Another thing I'm going to try to do, which should be easy, is to completely eliminate scrolling on the site with the exception of the blog. I'm figuring that by keeping the page height to 800 px max should work? I'm on two 22" monitors so some pages look small to me, but I know there are still a lot of people out there with smaller monitors still.

I did a quick mockup of basically what I want the site to look like if there were a homepage.

Thoughts? Advice? Criticisms?
 

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  • Homepage1.jpg
    Homepage1.jpg
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'splash' pages are a dead fad. "click here to enter" is so gay.
Not a splash screen. F those, I always thought they were :ghey:. When I see "Click here to enter" I usually close the damn tab because I know the site is gonna have a shitload of flash b.s.

I mean more of like what I have now if you check my site. That site was done in a Dreamweaver class I took, and I just reworked it a bit afterword to suit what I needed at the time. Now I'm questioning the need for a dedicated "home page" and wondering if it's more efficient to have visitors go to a more important part of the site right from the start.
 
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