Re: Proposed website design

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

On Sat, 2004-02-07 at 14:04, Oliver Burnett-Hall wrote:
> 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.  

Cool.  I did like the layout although I have a few reservations
(explained later) about it.

I think the colours need refining.  The yellow mouse over was hideous.

> It's usable on non-CSS browsers (e.g. links)

Just need to write a text-based css.  And a print css.

> will probably need some tweaking to cope with IE5.x.

*sigh* doesn't everything.  It's important to be IE5 compatable though
because we want to be accessible to people on older Windows machines who
perhaps can't run the latest versions of MS Office.

> I've used Charlie's banner - it's grown on me a lot

Thanks. :)

> I'm even beginning to think the coloured toes might be a good idea.

It's a war of attrition baby. ;)

> And I think the banner could do with shrinking vertically a bit; 
> 100 pixels is a bit tall for my tastes.

I've thought of a way to counter this one quite effectively without
actually reducing the size of the banner.  I'll try it and come up with
an updated draft ASAP but it won't be until Monday evening as I have
obligations for the next 48 hours.

> My idea is to have basically the same layout for both the page for the
> suite and for the applications.

I honestly believe that's a bit constraining.  The front page needs to
shout out "this is what we are!" and not really be flooded with
navigational links or detailed news - gnomedesktop.org is for news and
GO / GO-applications updates are infrequent enough not to require a
substantial news column (just headlines).   I think we only ever need
one column for the news and navigational links, freeing up lots of space
in which to advertise the features of the GO projects.

> 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.

I agree; we need to revamp the site ASAP which means we should only
concentrate on the core content for now.

> Initially I was thinking to do this all as static HTML, updating it as
> needed.  However, XSLT might be a better solution

Might?  Is.

> 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.

I don't think we should try to do everything so manually.  I think we
should adopt either Lenya [1] or Forrest [2].  They both integrate well
with xslt but should make content management a lot less manual.

[1] http://coccon.apache.org/lenya
[2] http://xml.apache.org/forrest

We could then support things like RSS feeds to make our content more
dynamic (grab headlines from footnotes?) and accessible.  (Our own GO
RSS feed!)

> 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.

Excellent.  My XSLT knowledge is at a fledgling status so it's good to
hear somebody has a bit more experience. ;)
-- 
- Charlie

The future of the net - www.xwt.org

Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
  Member of the XWT Foundation