[Webcom] Front page changes

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Hi all,
I've been reading through some marketing documents and tried to take  
a more critical eye to our front page (http://osgeo.org) - to reduce  
info overload among other things - I think I see a few ways we might  
be able to make it a bit cleaner.  See my rough hacked example  
(ignore style errors, <hr> problems, unrounded corners, etc.  I just  
did this screen shot with some local files.).  At this scale and with  
these changes it almost fits perfectly onto my little macbook 13"  
screen:

http://www.osgeo.org/files/tyler/site_ideas.png

1 - Reduce the spotlights from 3 to 1 entry - e.g. the latest  
showing, plus the "more" link.  Maybe set it so it's a full page wide  
instead of only one column.
2 - Then bump the News block over to the left to make it a bit  
tighter and put more dynamic content in front of the viewer.
3 - Disable the search function - I don't think it actually works  
well, unless we don't have it configured right.  (For example  
"FOSS4G" didn't yield anything related to FOSS4G 2008, and "degree"  
didn't return anything about the degree application)
4 - Then move the FOSS4G advert up into the header where Search was.   
This will move almost all the software projects in the right sidebar  
up to be more visible.
5 - Simplify the "Welcome to..." text to this:
"The Open Source Geospatial Foundation...
Created to support and build the highest-quality open source  
geospatial software. Our goal is to encourage the use and  
collaborative development of community-led projects.  Join us by  
signing up to our mailing lists or check out the Getting Started page  
to become more involved.
6 - Reduce the number of news and events in the listing (one less)
7 - Update to new logo when ready:
http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/browser/marketing/logo/OSGeo/PNG/ 
OSGeo_Main.png

What do you think?  Any other ideas, comments or concerns?  I'm sure  
there are more ideas for fixes waiting in the wings especially as  
marketing committee starts to dig into it.

Best wishes,
Tyler