User talk:Brent Dax/Main Page

This is a semi-proposal for a new Main Page layout. (I say "semi" because I'm not entirely happy with it.) The basic ideas are:

Emphasis shift: With the new layout, the main page's emphasis is more on the content, rather than the site itself. This seems better to me.
"News" in the left column, "Wikinews" in the right: separate the things Wikinewsies care about from the things casual visitors would.
Keep similar things together: I always hated how there were three lead articles, none of which were anywhere near the others (when you looked at it from a scrolling standpoint).
Get interesting-looking stuff above the bottom of the page: we want to grab visitors' attention, and the way to do that is with interesting text and pictures. The long lists of links are mostly off-screen.
Make original reporting more prominent: We want to encourage this stuff, right?

There are still a few issues I have with this layout, mainly because I wanted to keep using the same underlying templates:

I don't like the "Featured story" on the third lead.
I'd prefer to have fewer days of news on the page. This might also allow the weather to move into the left column, where it probably belongs.
I'm really not sure what to do with the list of countries; at the moment it's at the bottom, but I don't really like that.
There is some extra spacing above the second and third leads that should be removed.