User talk:Peculiar Investor/Main page 2021

If I were launching finiki today, what should be considered and what would be key to success of the main page?
Some key concepts: From a content point of view, our main page should include (in order of importance). I'm intentionally ignoring built-in MediaWiki elements such as the search box and the navigation sidebar.
 * The wiki should be device independent, desktop, tablet and smartphones need to be considered
 * Above the fold still matters
 * Wikipedia is well known, we are not. Readers more than likely stumble upon us, whereas they intentionally go to Wikipedia.
 * Rightly or wrongly, our wiki and our forum are separate domains, so newcomers don't know the connection. We need to make that connection.
 * Current design trends seem to involve lots of whitespace, colour and other 'eye-candy', sometimes to the detriment of actual content. Simplicity seems to be "in".
 * First impressions matter and depend on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more. We have control of some of these.
 * The demographic of those finding and using the wiki might not necessarily line up with the demographic of admins/editors/contributors
 * Do it yourself investing and personal finance tends to wordy more than visual (images). But unfortunately our competition is deep pocket financial institutions that have huge marketing budgets.
 * My guess is many arrive readers via search engines directly on a specific article and then follow the wiki navigation tools (navbars, sidebars, search box) and may never visit the main page
 * If you Google enough, you can find design guides/statistics/research to support any preconceived notion and idea.
 * Introduce ourselves and our wiki, what content can be found within
 * Highlight the key areas of the wiki, i.e. high level structure
 * Bring attention to what we think are the high profile, most important articles.
 * Entice the reader to stay and explore further
 * Make the connection to the discussion forum as a place to ask questions about what you've read and how to apply it in your circumstances

Some other works of interest are MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018 and Small wiki toolkits/Starter kit/Main page customization --Peculiar Investor 13:29, 8 January 2021 (MST)