If you’re trying to use a conditional to display or not display something on your home page, you should be aware that this conditional:

is_home()

only works for the blog posts page.  If you have your home set to a static page, it won’t affect that page.  It will continue to work for whatever page you have set as the blog posts page.  In order to create a conditional that works on any home page, you need to use:

is_front_page ()

This was added in 2.5 and corresponds to the terminology used in Settings -> Reading, where you choose the “front page” of your site – whether it’s your blog posts or a static page.

Read more in the WordPress codex on conditionals.