wiki frontpage suggestions from dmartin

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 02:28:57PM -0600, Andy Doan wrote:
> We just updated wiki.linare.org with a new default theme. In addition
> we've created a new front page to the wiki that is intended to make some
> of most important links more discoverable.
>
> Most people should just press refresh to see the changes. However, if
> you've updated your wiki account with the non-default theme, you won't
> see the changes. You'll need to go to "Settings"->"Preferences" and set
> the theme to either "default" or "linaro-narrow".
>
> While this is mostly cosmetic, we had a session at Connect where we
> outlined many other work items to help make other more substantial
> improvements.
>
> = Details of Changes (if you are interested)
>
> 1. The wiki now uses a maximum width for its page content so that text
> doesn't get really wide when you try to read. So now, unless your
> browser is set really narrow, you'll see a border around the sides of
> the page content.
>
> 2. The standard banner for links to other websites now shows up on the
> top of the page.
>
> 3. The table-of-contents macro now renders correctly when you try and
> embed it in a table that floats on the right.
That's certainly much less cluttered than the previous page -- it looks
like a good improvement.

I think for the table of links we do need an explanation of what each
item is, though this should literally just be a few words.

There are also some things there which would be fairly incomprehensible
to a newcomer. What is "Cycles", for example? People also won't be
able to guess what "Connect" refers to without laboriously reading the
other text.

I would vote for removing all the links from the introductory paragraph
-- the precence of links disrupts the readability of the text
unnecessarily IMHO, and putting all the links into the table.

Could we also experiment with ordering the links so that the stuff for
newcomers appears first, and the resources for developers come afterwards,
perhaps in a separate table? We need to give newcomers a bit of extra
help, because they're the people who will need it.

On a more frivolous note, could we change the title to something like
"Welcome to the Linaro Wiki"? This is friendlier, and helps to
suggest that the site is for non-experts too. In practice, the wiki
isn't just for developers, after all.

Cheers
---Dave