> There seems there is no general consensus about what should be first.

I think there is, but existing implementations are more or less
successful. There should be a design pattern for home pages.

The audience for a home page is both newcomers or even people
wandering by, and people that want to follow the community. Both have
different questions when they arrive on the page:

newcomers:
- what the hell is Squeak ?
- where are the screenshots ?
- where are the tutorials ?
- where do I get/try it ?

followers:
- where is the latest release ?
- what is happening in the community (events, releases, hot projects,
misc news) ?
- where is the documentation/technical papers ?
- where is the source / version control / bugtracker ?
- how is the community organized ? (think debian guidelines or friend
sites like squeaksource, squeak foundation etc)

I like http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ because it doesn't look academic
like haskell (purely aesthetic) nor corporate bs like java or vb
(java.sun.com is better than java.com btw), and it's visually clearer
than python's page.

- big logo that means "yes, this is THE official page"
- Ruby is... + small code sample that changes at each reload
- news that mean "yes, we,re alive"
- big download link
- get started / explore / participate sidebar blocks that you see as
soon as you spend a few seconds looking at the page.

-- 
Damien Pollet
type less, do more [ | ] http://typo.cdlm.fasmz.org