Along with my 10 years of web design experience, there a 3 elements that I believe make a good home/web site:
1. Clean look - you never see Amazon or Microsoft with an extremely busy-looking home page.
2. Fast load time - there are still people on 56k, although the numbers are diminishing (thank God!). Regardless, compression of images and such to make your pages load fast are vital to your site.
3. Easy navigation - if a visitor cannot get back to any page within 3 clicks, the navigation needs to be reevaluated.
Those three elements implemented into your home page and overall web site will never steer you wrong.
Regards,
Tony