User talk:Brent Dax/Main Page

This is a semi-proposal for a new Main Page layout. (I say "semi" because I'm not entirely happy with it.) The basic ideas are:


 * Emphasis shift: With the new layout, the main page's emphasis is more on the content, rather than the site itself. This seems better to me.
 * "News" in the left column, "Wikinews" in the right: separate the things Wikinewsies care about from the things casual visitors would.
 * Keep similar things together: I always hated how there were three lead articles, none of which were anywhere near the others (when you looked at it from a scrolling standpoint).
 * Get interesting-looking stuff above the bottom of the page: we want to grab visitors' attention, and the way to do that is with interesting text and pictures. The long lists of links are mostly off-screen.
 * Make original reporting more prominent: We want to encourage this stuff, right?

There are still a few issues I have with this layout, mainly because I wanted to keep using the same underlying templates:
 * I don't like the "Featured story" on the third lead.
 * I'd prefer to have fewer days of news on the page. This might also allow the weather to move into the left column, where it probably belongs.
 * I'm really not sure what to do with the list of countries; at the moment it's at the bottom, but I don't really like that.
 * There is some extra spacing above the second and third leads that should be removed.

Let me know. &mdash;Brent Dax (talk) 00:25, 12 September 2005 (UTC)