Designing a Portal landing page & home page in a customized way is a time taking process and involves lot of research in order to have a good UI Experience.
This article provides you couple of samples that may assist you while creating a new custom portal.
OOTB Icon Link Widget is normally used to display different links, but you may also consider to use this kind of links to provide a new look and feel.
Here you go.
#Small Icon Link - Under the search bar, you may have these icons widget in case if your content is huge on the home page and don't want to use regular Icon Link Widget.
Widget Name - Round Buttons
#Transparent/White background Icon Links - You may have this Icon Widget as well in place of regular Icon link widget
Widget Name - WidgetIcon
On mouse over, looks like this
Change the color using the css of this widget as per your choice
Finally, this provides a different experience
XML's are attached here. Please feel free to provide your comments. I will come up with some other examples in my next series.
Thanks,
Narsing
