I am moving from Confluence Server 6.11 (which made some changes to the fonts and spacing, but essentially retained the very functional structures of the UI). I am starting with the Cloud Confluence. I am in shock. I understand that there is no way to get that old classic UI back. I am hoping that users will share their tricks with me for cleaning up the current interface, making better use of the white space on a page, and getting back some of the elegant navigation and sidebar options of the old UI.
One serious question for me is this: how do I create a nice clean site home page? I have set the site homepage as one of the spaces - the same way I did this in the server version. But there is junk on the sidebar which I can't remove. I want to clean up the sidebar and add some shortcut links, but the tools for that only show when I navigate to that space via the space directory. I don't want the personal setting icons to be on this home page sidebar. And I don't want Activity, Your Work, Spaces folder and Settings on this sidebar. I want to be able to add links to the main spaces.
I do not want the Space Settings cog to show up on the space homepage. The edit pencil at the bottom is enough.
When I'm working down in the tree of pages on a space, I want to be able to click the space home page name and/or icon and be taken back to the home page of the space.
there is a lot of wasted space at the top of a new page. Just too much space. Plus the Created By information showing the photo wastes too much space compared to the old way of doing this.
These are just some examples. Any strategies which people have used to clean up the UI and improve navigation will be greatly appreciated. (Of course I also hope that Atlassian is working on improvements, or a return to the Classic UI.)
Thank you for your help.