Let me bookmark it and tell my friends. The WOW factor really is a combination of graphic design and packaging. It also depends on the site. Tables allow the designer to better control what a visitor sees when they enter the home page. Tables are also very important in giving a home page some structure.
Many designers fall for the old scrolling, horizontal graphic-separated, home page of boredom.
Tables cure this condition by allowing the designer to make columns. Columns allow a webmaster to put more things on the screen at one time, in easy to read blocks of text. In a way very similar to newspapers, home pages built with tables and columns allows the webmaster to control the eye movement of a visitor. To see this effect, I've analyzed the front page of my local daily newspaper. The eyes start at the headline, move down through the large photo in the middle, on down to the graphic illustration in the lower left of the page, and on over to the color picture in the lower right.