Home button

[Mia]

What are people's thoughts on home buttons? I'm having a bit of a space issue in my navigation and it would help to get rid of it.

The logo goes home, of course, and the site is aimed at web savy people, but am I sacrificing usability in favour of visual design?

Hmm...

[David]

My policy for some time now has been to remove the "home" link from primary navigation. There are 3 reasons for this:
1. It saves space.
2. Peoples awareness of the logo-link convention is high and even if your site is aimed low, you can implement something like the mouse over effect on our programme website and/or add it to a utility menu (e.g. CADTutor).
3. To me, a "home" link on primary navigation is semantically troubling because all other links are directed at sub-sections of the site and "home" is not a sub-section. For the same reason, I wouldn't normally add a "contact" link there either - but this all depends on the complexity of the site. Clearly, if you have a simple site with just a few pages, they could all be on primary nav (including "home") but that's OK because in terms of a hierarchy, they are pretty much equal. www.davidwatson.info (http://www.davidwatson.info) is a good example of this. Notice that that site doesn't even have a homepage as such, meaning that all pages have equal weight and all reside on the primary nav.

If you look around the web, there isn't a great deal of consensus on this but if you apply the right logic to your particular site design, you'll come up with the right solution.