First of all thank you for giving us the opportunity to participate.
The welcome page is one of the first impressions a new user gets from steemit, so it's a quite important one.
Growth has been defined as THE no. 1 short term goal according to steemit's roadmap, acquiring and holding new users is and will be key to the platform's success during the next months.
From that perspective the current page is quite 'functional'. If user acquisition was the no. 1 aim, I would try to welcome new people in a different - more emotional - way. Do we have the possibility to link multimedia here? Then I would include the promotion video which was presented in Amsterdam, for instance. The user generated video published by winstonwolfe is also a great piece which shows what a creative and unique community we are.
Before 'instructing' people how to technically use the site and its features, I would rather 'show' them what an outstanding place steemit is, why they are so damn right here, I would make them 'hungry', willing to be part of it... catch them. Please excuse my marketing language ;-))

Last but not least: why not including a short welcome speech done by @dantheman and @ned? A personal 'hello, it's great to have you on board - steemit is the future and you are going to be part of it' is easy to provide and surely would have a great impact...

With regards to the functional advices I have nothing to add.

Again thanks for asking and: happy weekend to all of us! :-)