(making the main content appear before the sidebars)

heh... google was insulted that you thought that he could not tell the content from the wrapper.

If a host is not delivering super service.  Leave them.  Right away.

Slow service can reduce visitor interest in your website.

That will tank your sales.

Slow service can compromise spidering.

That can cause ranking problems.

Don't work your ass off on your website and tolerate this type of service.

If it costs a few bucks more per month so what... look what you are losing.

let's say you have a site loaded with pages with 2k+ word articles.

This describes my  site.

Would a lightly-populated index page (less LA Times, more Big Background) have a negative impact, beyond the obvious missed opportunity for having that page have more content as well?

If I reduced my homepage to minimalist content I would miss at minimum, 50,000 visitors per month.  The diverse words on that homepage pull in nearly 1/2 of its traffic and they also enable it to rank better in many SERP.

This homepage also holds lots of #2 rankings, where one of my article pages holds #1.  That occurs because the homepage is made relevant by the diverse words.

We can assume the minimalist index page would have appropriate page optimization, including some content (just not lots).

To me this means that you will get "some" traffic rather than "lots".

Many websites have more search traffic entering through their homepage than any other page on the site.  And it is usually the strongest page to use in battle for difficult keywords.

We seem to be from different perspectives.  I sense that you are married to a visual effect... and I am married to using my homepage as a traffic-pulling machine.

There are design features that allow a page to contain a lot of spiderable text that is revealed with a click and pages that rotate visible content one cell at a time but hold lots of total text.  Perhaps one of those would be a way for you to have both.

Publishing on "pages" or "posts" is not the consideration.

What is important is the quality of what you publish and how you organize your content and present it to your audience.

Slashdot effect

We occasionally have content that engages the visitor on one of these community sites.  It can start on one -such as slashdot - them move across several social sites such ad digg, reddit, stumbleupon.  Great content can pull 100,000 visitors in a day from these sources alone - plus generate a lot of links, likes, tweets, etc.

I would.... put the links in the top nav and place adsense at the top position of the left nav.

Those pen offers are very very similar.  Identical product descriptions except for perhaps number being sold or color or width of the tip.

If these were on my site they would all be on the same page.  One page to concentrate/conserve the linkjuice.  One page to make thicker content.   One page to present all of the options to the customer at same time.  (PITA to click between lots of pages to make up your mind as a shopper).   One page to make maintenance easy.