OK, thoughts sent.
Oh, wait, your telepathy isn't working today? (sigh) OK, I'll do that fiddly brain - fingers - keyboard thing then...
I think there are three questions here:
1. What content areas do we want to have directly linked on the front page?
2. How do we set those links up so that they are as low-maintenance as possible?
3. What do we do with the front page layout / UI to make those links more prominent?
1. Content areas
I'm not sure about this, but I think as a minimum they include:
- the top-level forum
- the Articles section
- game-dev activities (roughly Exilian Projects in the forum)
- other creative activities (roughly The Street of the Clerisy)
- any other external links for Exilian content (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Mastodon, etc.)
2. Maintenance
I agree about trying to avoid specific pages for content areas where we can, because they will require maintenance effort. This would imply that links to forum sections are the way to go, but this would require the forum to be structured appropriately, and I'm not sure it is at the moment. In particular, I'm not sure we can provide a link to a section like Exilian Projects. Could we get PHP/SQL to generate a suitable page of links from the forum structure?
3. Front page layout
At the moment, it feels to me as if the menu is rather swamped by the other page elements - particularly the announcements, which occupy about 2/3 of the screen area, and in a larger font too. As a minimum, I would go for reducing the Announcements screen area and font size somewhat, and emphasizing the menu more. On the same principle, I suggest taking the Welcome message out of the right-hand narrow column, and putting it in a larger font in the main column, perhaps immediately under the logo. It might also be worth reviewing what we do with the Latest Posts and Links boxes in the right-hand column.