I've had a first bash at a website design. It's far from finished; most links are broken, the content needs a _lot_ of work and it's all still a bit rough, but I thought I'd show it to get a bit of feedback on what people think of the general look and layout. URL is http://www.burnett-hall.co.uk/~ojbh/testing/gnome-office/. This is the main page for the suite, I've also done an (even rougher) page for Gnumeric - the links should take you there. I've tested the layout on Firebird, Opera and IE6 and it seems to work on all of them. It's usable on non-CSS browsers (e.g. links), but will probably need some tweaking to cope with IE5.x. I've used Charlie's banner - it's grown on me a lot, and I'm even beginning to think the coloured toes might be a good idea. The text in the middle of the banner needs to be replaced by an image (transparent GIF or something) to avoid problems with different font sizes. And I think the banner could do with shrinking vertically a bit; 100 pixels is a bit tall for my tastes. My idea is to have basically the same layout for both the page for the suite and for the applications. Here's what I'm thinking about for application pages: +----------------------------------------------------------+ | GNOME Office icon Application Name App icon | +----------------------------------------------------------+ +----------------+ +-----------+ | Links to other | General description | News list | | GO apps | of application | for this | | | | app | | Links specific | Link to screenshots | | | to this app | +-----------+ | (docs, install | Supported platforms | instructions, | and languages | etc.) | +----------------+ Detailed description of application features latest releases, stable and (if applicable) development. +----------------------------------------------------------+ | Copyright, webmaster contact details | +----------------------------------------------------------+ The page for the suite will differ slightly in that the links will be to suite-level stuff, the news will include things from all applications and the features section will be brief descriptions the component apps. If you have a look at what I've got up so far then you should get the idea. I think this would be sufficient for an initial revision of the site. Once this is done we could think about maybe adding more marketing-type information - 'Why choose GNOME Office' type stuff, case studies, etc. Initially I was thinking to do this all as static HTML, updating it as needed. However, XSLT might be a better solution - earlier messages suggested using DocBook and Guide-XML for this but I think they're both way more complicated than we'd need. All we'd need is a source XML file describing each application's features plus news files and then we'd use transforms to combine them all. This would make it easier to enforce a consistent layout across different pages, and make sure it's always producing valid HTML. I've done quite a lot of XSLT in the past, so this won't be a problem - I'll look at producing some stylesheets and XSD files in the next few days. Anyway, please let me know what you think. I'm thick-skinned enough to cope :) - olly
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