Home Page Ideas... friendly

The way the homepage is designed will encourage visitors to stay on or off the site, and give them an impression that will influence their judgment about the content, regardless of its quality.

The statistical tool of your hosting can indicate the rebound rate of home page visitors, in other words, those who do not view other pages.
Since the home page does not answer the question, but serves for orientation, the rebound frequency should approach zero (which cannot be said about the internal pages, because you leave the site when you find what you are looking for ).
The further the rate is from zero and the more it demonstrates dissatisfaction.

What to do

Node location
The visitor should, and this is the role of the home page, know what the site belongs to. This can be explicitly or implicitly specified by the objects represented.
He should have an idea of what he can find or do on the site. He can be shown examples.
Balanced structure
This applies to all pages, but especially the home page. Avoid empty areas, calculate the distribution of space according to the relative importance of the elements. Avoid imbalances between components.
Top of the hierarchy
The home page does not provide direct access to all content on the site, but to categories that themselves provide access to all articles that affect them.
Ideally, the best pages that have the largest audience are available from the homepage, the rest on more specialized ones.
Image of a human face
Several times, the sight of the face captures the visitor's attention and encourages him to continue the visit.
But it very much depends on the topic of the site. If the visitor does not like the face, he will leave the site without a good reason. This is, of course, appropriate on a travel site or any human relations activity, not a tech site.
A photo of a sexy girl may appeal to the visitor in a way that can be annoying. Advertising using this fireworks is not addressed to a mature audience... or female.

It's easy to document your home page. Only on the web, but when viewing any magazine. The summary is what a customer looks at in bookstore radii before making a purchase decision, so they are treated by the publisher to encourage them to continue reading.

In the case of a blog, the home page is simultaneously internal, design tips no longer apply to the page body, but continue to apply to the sidebar or part of the page.

What to avoid

Prompt
This means placing an image or frame that you can click on to start visiting the site.
This was very common in its time and there are always sites that maintain this practice, which is worth nothing either to the user's experience or to search engines.
Content list
Giving a list of everything the site contains can be rebarbative and there is little incentive. When there is too much information, it is ignored as a block.
In fact, a few well-chosen examples are enough for the visitor to have a desire to continue the visit. The role of internal connections will be to make all content available from afar, in stages.
Commercial presentation
The words used to praise the site take up space that will be used better. Visitors are not interested in knowing that your site is the first or best (supposedly). This is what might have interested him at the time of choosing sites to visit, but since it already exists, it is no longer relevant. That is, exactly what he will find there.
Pop-ups
This applies to all pages, but even more so to the home page. If the visitor is annoyed from the very beginning by something as inconvenient as the window that arises to hide the contents of the page, then what chance to stay on the site? And give backlinks if he is a webmaster?

And in conclusion, advice is not worth the experience. It is by looking at the number of sites, and, as I said, consulting magazines, and noting what is appreciated there and what worries us or encourages us to leave, that you will learn how to improve your own site .