url path with children pages of a frontpage static page

This is a default structure that WP will keep for parent/child pages.
Is there any particular reason why you assign pages as children of “homepage” page?

Reason: the design I was given expects that in the homepage there are 3 boxes in a row each one with a title and a thumbnail (featured image) and each one pointing to a page and I though to get those 3 pages with a call to wp_list_pages() and the parameter “child_of” set to current homepage post ID from the homepage template.

Since that solution was ugly dued to the resulting generated url, I’ve moved those 3 pages in the root and set up a settings options page in the dashboard to specifiy the 3 IDs of the pages I want to make appear in the boxes as a comma separate list of ids (12,34,56).

Hmm, how about adding custom field to each post you want to appear on home page and run query to get posts with key/value pair?
So lets say you add custom field slider=home to each page you want added.
Then query like this:

$featuredArgs = array(
    'post_type' => 'page',
    'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' => 'slider',
            'value' => 'home',
            'compare' => '='
        )
    )
 );
$featuredQuery = new WP_Query( $featuredArgs );

And here you just loop posts returned by the query?

Thanks, and sorry for the delay in replying.

I did in a similar way, with a small Options page to hold page IDs togheter with other custom settings ??