Re: Proposed website design

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

> 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.
>

This is very nice work. If I hadn't seen Ryan's "GO" logos I would have
said this is just we've been looking for. However I really Ryan's work. I
also really like the "GO" brand. It's very powerful I think. Is there
someway you can incorporate Ryan's work in your designs?

Cheers

Martin

> 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
>