Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
May I change the layout of the homepage of the English Wikipedia to that of the Esperanto Wikipedia? I think that layout looks much better. I would ask this on [[Talk:Main Page]], but not many people look there that often, and this would be a huge change.
IMO that is HMTL madness -- WAY too many spurious colors that mean nothing and whose only purpose is to look "purty" in the eyes of the designer. We have already worked out a more conservative color scheme for the Main Page but were waiting for some earth-shattering announcement to make to go with the upgrade (such as "The Wikimedia Foundation is open for business and is now accepting donations!" - not that we would say that on the Main Page but we would have a link to a press release).
See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/Temp Which is based on: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
We really should be very conservative with making big noticeably changes to that page because so many people visit it every day. Making a big change is going to make people think that something is different and then they will be more likely to see the link to the press release (we did this for our last press release and it worked very well).
Color rational: White is for articles (thus the background for the category links is white/unchanged), Yellow is for community (since all our user, talk, and wikipedia pages are yellow) and Blue is for hyperlinks. I guess red for edit links would also be neat (indicating there is always something else to cover) but that would be too many colors and red is also a bit heavy.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)