How to Set the Home Page in Safari?

There is no such concept of a home page for Safari on the iPhone OS. The page that will display when you launch Safari is the last page you looked at in Safari. You can enable the bookmarks bar (in the Settings app) & place some common sites there, so it is one click to any of your favorites.

open safari, go to the site you want as your home page, click the plus at top of screen to add bookmark, select add to home screen.
That will place the safari icon with the image of the site you want on your home screen. Now when you click on this Safari icon it will open to your home screen. The other poster was correct there is no real home screen but this works fine for me.

I also dragged the original icon of safari off the dock and added my new home page icon to the dock. So whenever I see the dock i see my safari home page

I dont understand your first sentence. when you click on the icon i am talking about it brings you to the page you have set not a new page.

You can only put 6 items on the dock, take the original safari icon off the dock and replace with the new one, you still have 6 items.

Yes you need two taps to get back to your home page. From my use with the ipad, surfing with the ipad, is a different experience than with a laptop. You may discover that the home page is less important with the iPad

There are bookmarks in the menu and there are bookmarks in the bar. If you place your "homepage" on the bar, it is the equivalent of having a homepage icon on the very top. If you want to clean up your bookmarks or bookmark bar, create folders.

I did this but was wondering if there was a way to adjust the icon it creates. instead of a picture of the page i went to, i would prefer the safari icon (especially if i want to replace Safari in the dock).