Redirect not working at all

Hi all, Here's my situation :
Page1 with an image and a link to page2
page2 with content and promoted to front page
I want all my users to land at page1 when they open the site and thereafter any home link should take them to page2.
In my frontpage settings I have set default home page to page1 and redirect to page2.
However, right now the home link keeps taking me back to page1. What am I missing?
I do have pathauto to generate url aliases and am using those aliases in the frontpage settings.
Can somebody please tell me what I am doing wrong?