I've been roped into discussions on wiki structuring and front pages at work too (I steamrolled a mediawiki into adoption there), so here's some of the thoughts we've had that probably apply here too.

I know we're discussing the Intro page here, but the structure we choose for Intro can be reused for quite a lot of other things. Think wikipedia portals; the visual semantics are preserved. Let me try to be more specific: it would be great if for example the Qt4 landing page or the Community landing page were structured identically to the Intro and/or Main_Page (am I being subtle enough about thinking those should merge? ).

MW does support templates but I distinctly recall not being very impressed, and looking at the wikipedia front page (which history will remember that I shamelessly stole for my mockup) and portal page markup, I see that they only use templates for elements inside the page, not for the whole shebang.

I don't really have that much to say about the design since the mockup speaks better, but once we've found something we like my feeling is it ought to trigger future sprints for thematic areas: a new users portal page for example, a developers portal, etc. Having that would incidentally take some information load off the Intro page; you'd just say "You a developer, gal/fella? Fine, click developer portal" instead of having a whole box talking at developers.

Once the concepts of a wikified front and wikified thematic portals are in place, the big benefit is that we've de facto established a semblance of hierarchical organisation. I say semblance because wiis don't do hierarchy, they only mimic it. But heirarchical data representations are probably easier for a lot of people to navigate through. So carrying the Intro design over to thematic areas helps reinforce this heirarchical wiki representation.

And who knows, you might get endless layers of thematic portals. The Qt propellerheads under development for example side by side with the Gnome hippies and so on.

Sorry if this doesn't sound like it has to do with /Intro; I intend it to have everything with the /Intro page to do. I think my point here is simply that greater ambition is possible with this page. The way Intro gets structured can help improve structure elsewhere.

Whether the Intro link belongs in div id="navigation" up there, my opinion is yes. The sooner people are guided towards areas where they can contribute (wiki) as well as read the better, on principle.

Can we wikify maemo.nokia.com too? Please?


(holy wall of text; sorry!)