Current Progress

We've decided to use Lizzeh's mockup as our foundation:

let's go for a minimal header
no paragraph
three blocks will be:
1. Get help (or Get support)
2. Merchandise
3. Get involved
Below the three blocks we need a horizontal banner below the 3 boxes with 2-3 images taken from the tour and link the entire banner to the tour page. For the problem of the translation of images, the "Take a tour" text can be out of the banner.
no heron, no ibex, no local search, no ubuntu search.

Historical information below

The below items are now obsolete and kept for historical purposes.

Goals:

Translate the items on the right hand side
Possibly add some dynamic content, for example gadgets/widgets from google?
Google search box needs to be centered and fill the whole width, bumping the right hand column down to start parallel with "Getting help with Ubuntu"
Visual style needs to change to be more like Intrepid, which won't be known until around 8.10 beta release
Build script needs improvement. It's very rough
Some of the translations need improvement - this is handled by the doc team

Lizzeh (BinaryDigit)'s Idea for Start Page

Comments (François) on start page layout

I think it's a page that we would like people to KEEP as the homepage of their browser, right? Then I don't know if we should keep this big header and probably not even this introduction text about Ubuntu.

I mean, I'm a lambda user, I just installed ubuntu on the computer, I know which OS I'm using, so I don't need a "welcome" message except first time I launch the OS maybe. Same for the introduction text, once OK, but every time? It's taking plenty of room at the top of the page. I see this page more like the IGoogle one, with some cool widgets. I'm a big fan of Google interfaces: it's clean, polished, simple. Look at iGoogle, of course you can see the Google logo, but it's not that big, it's just to "brand" the page. The focus is on the content and functionalities. I would definitely focus on this too for this page. I don't like to scroll too much on this kind of page. It should be very user friendly from the start, all the main info and interesting content without any scrolling.

Volans's proposal

Only a quick realization of my idea for the Start Page, let me explain some details:

Graphics details, icons and colours are not essential for the idea, obviously they can be changed
All the localized buttons should have the name of the locale language
For the English Start Page the buttons can be left out leaving only the titles like Wiki linking the relative English resource
The Google search box is a Custom Google search box, one for every locale. This is more simpler that it seems at first sight because the custom Google search can be managed trough text files where all the options of the customized search are saved, allowing a simple synchronization with the LocoTeams. The result page can be either in the Google site or in a Ubuntu site with specific layout using the Google Custom Search API.
Brief explanation under the System Help title in order to explain the user how to open and use it. I think that the System Help is used not as much as deserved,