Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP Site Redesign

[Kasim Ahmic <kasim ahmic gmail com>]

Let me just start off by saying thank you for all the feedback!

One thing is missing: mobile-friendly layouts.  The current site is
not fantastic at mobile size, but it's more usuable than your demo.
Apologies if you were already planning to take care of this.
As for HTML5, I've seen my fill of browser-specific issues with HTML
4.0 and XHTML.  Avoid the stuff that's still in churn (eg, canvas tag
the last time I checked), and HTML5 is fine IMO, and a lot more fun to
work with.

 To be completely honest, I purposefully avoided mobile support. Considering that GIMP is a desktop exclusive program, I figured that adding mobile support would be a waste of time. If there is enough demand for it, however, I'll attempt to add it.

I think the background image of the text "GIMP - The freely distributed image editor..." distracts from its content. Perhaps heavily blurring it might help - if it doesn't, use something else more background-like (the same image is in the animation on the right anyway).

 I entirely agree with the fact that it distracts the user. That's why I asked for suggestions on its replacement. I'll try blurring the background to see how that works out.

I don't think it's that big of an issue.  We live in an age of high resolution monitors.  Higher resolution images would be good to take advantage of that.  Personally I like the current site design (on gimp.org); primarily because I enjoy reading the GIMP news as soon as I get to the site (which I avidly check even though it's not updated very often).  For me it just means more clicks to get to news.  I guess I'll just depend on my RSS feed as it's not that big of a deal.

How about if I add a "Recent News" section between the body and footer? Sort of a small feed that shows the 3-5 latest articles. I'll probably also add a twitter feed (should the GIMP devs want to tweet their progress) and a latest books feed or something along those lines. I've updated the demo with this but for now it's just to show where the feeds would go. No styling has actually been added yet.

To add on to my previous statements I'd like the front page to be edited a bit more.  I'll quote the previous text and then follow that with what I would like to see it say.   Note: 
> Professional Level Photo Filters
> Make your photos picture perfect with with prefessional-grade color filtering.
> 
> Play with the Tools of the Trade
> GIMP comes ready with everything you need to design like a pro.
--------------------------------- Suggested Changes....
Professional Photo Filters
Make your photos picture perfect with professional-grade color filtering.
Draft with the Tools of the Trade
GIMP has a robust set of tools and can be easily extended through add-ons.

Thanks for this! I've replaced the text on the page with your suggestion.

The answer to this is liquid, responsive designs using CSS media
queries. This approach works in all modern browsers and is compatible
with older browsers (and with Web crawlers).

I've already tried this. hoping to make it super fluid and look amazing on all screen sizes. But with the way that Mike aligned everything, it makes it extremely difficult to make sure everything stays in place and even more so when I'm designing everything on a 1024x768 monitor. I stuck with a static design because it's easier to manage and I know it'll look the same on every display aside from those smaller than 1024x768. I'll try to make it fluid again sometime in the future.

Oh and I'm not sure if you guys are thanking me for making the site or for designing it. If it's for the latter, then please know that I had no part in it's designing. That was all Mike Finch.