One of the things that my teachers in high school always teach, when it comes to design less text is better... I think that little rule-of-thumb would work nice for your homepage...
recon16, I wouldn't still be going on advice given by a high school professor. Obviously he has very little website design knowledge. Less text is a poor decision if you intend to rely on any search engine traffic. More graphics than text also takes longer to load. Speaking of load time, the forum on this website takes quite a while to load. The header graphic is over 300kb which is far too large. It is a Christmas themed header, so I guess it's only temporary. I personally like this design, but I would probably choose a different font. Obviously once you're done the homepage design, it should be consistent throughout your website.