I love this UI for an Open Government Portal and would love this to be the splash page for our Geonode implementation.
http://offeneskoeln.de/ I think in general Geonode follows the GIS (read ESRI) model too closely – it expects you to be interested already in layers, maps, data, shapefiles, GeoTiffs but really all people want to do is see a map and search. They will soon discover the layers and APIs, but initially get them interested in a place and what you have to offer. The splash/search page would serve return users as well who just remember finding something related to “x” but not where it was on the site. Not sure what mapping tech they are using but seems to be OSM. Donovan
