What's the best way to structure "Header" pages in Confluence

[Dave Menconi]

I like to have my confluence pages organized into "trees" with a header (or root, if you prefer) page that has an index to all the pages under it. These pages (in my system) don't have content; they are just an index.

Usually I just create a page, give it a title and add a page tree macro that's restricted to this page (@self).

This works but it's BORING!

How do you like to spiff this page so it pops a little better?

A few of my ideas are to

• Have some kind of colorful horizontal bar to give it a bit of color and make it clear that this is a header and not a leaf page.
• Have a few sentences about what might be in this collection of pages.
• Have some "Key Links" that are the most important, curated, subpages.

What ideas do you have to make header pages more interesting?

Or do you guys even USE header pages? (It's the obvious way to structure a wiki for me, but surely it's not the ONLY way to do it. )

By the way, not everything that works on server works the same way on Cloud but MOST things do so this could be cross platform.

[Patrick Haley]

Depends on the content of the child pages for. Most of the time I use a Page Tree to display the hierarchy of subpages. Lately, I've been using the Page Properties report to get even more info about the child pages. For example, I created a Service Catalogue and use the report to see a snapshot overview of each service in our portfolio. I also use Page Properties to organize meeting notes underneath. 

[Patrick Vanhoof]

You can also use the Excerpt macro on the child pages. Macro's like e.g. Page tree allow you to also show the excerpts.