Good points on items that are of no practical use. Splash pages and slide shows are only good if the user happens to enter the site on that particular page. If the user is following a search result link, odds are they'll end up on some obscure blog post or forum post. I made a post here in the notes regarding a site I'm working on with full width menus, because I think it relates in a general way to this topic by Caltrade. I am going to use content rich drop menus to give users a quick overview see more of each section of the site. This way the user can get a quick overview of the entire site no matter what page they enter on.
That is a good point about "following a search result link". Maybe it is still too early, but I am getting squat from the search engines right now even though I now have at least some content. You will hate the visuals on this, but as an example of a site I did that is good at this check out http://caltrade.com/directory. No one comes to that from the homepage, it is all from deep linkss, and it is SEO'd up the ying yang.