Re: Area cover sheets and site structure progress

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

digitect mindspring com wrote:
> 
> Finally found time to work up some "cover sheets" for each area of the site:

Some random thoughts:

> Home/user:  http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-user.html

Works pretty well; links show up against the banner picture reasonably
and the gnome foot backdrop in the sidebar is subtle enough not to look
tacky.  What sort of thing is going to be on the "Welcome" page?  Which
would be the homepage, this or the welcome page?

Graphical "Find" button in sidebar-- need to be careful of things like
this, for accessibility... if somebody needs to pump up their font size
to 4x the usual to read the page comfortably, you can bet they won't be
able to read the text here (unless they're using something like Opera
which can magnify images too).  It also doesn't really look much like
either a button or a link.

> Developer:  http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-developer.html

Colours don't work quite so well here IMHO; the gnome foot gets a little
lost against the black background, and it looks like you've introduced a
new link and/or visited link colour in the right-hand sidebar.  Better
to keep the same link colours everywhere as far as possible IMHO, at
least within the same page, even if that limits your background palette
a bit.

"Developer Community" banner link takes you to a page with "Developer
Community" in the sidebar; "GNOME Foundation" takes you to one with
"GNOME Foundation"; "Shop" and "Search" will presumably be equally
consistent... but "GNOME", I assume, takes you to the one that says
"Using GNOME".  Perhaps the banner link could be changed to "Using
GNOME", if it can be squeezed in...?

> Foundation: http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-foundation.html

Looks fine, although again the "GNOME" banner link gets swallowed up by
the background image a bit.

> Search/Map: http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-search.html

Colours are fine, banner links stand out nicely on the solid
background.  Mottled sidebar backdrop looks a bit cliched and tacky
though, IMHO.  

"Simple", "Images" and "Source" textboxes:  only "Images" was an obvious
term to me here... maybe "Keywords", "Images" and "Source code" or
something would be better.  Also, rather than cluttering up the page
with three search boxes, it would probably be better to have just the
one, and check boxes for selecting whether you wanted to search text,
images or source.  That way you could also search more than one category
at once.

As for the off-site search engines... personally I hate to see them on
unrelated sites-- they compete for my attention, it's never clear
whether they're going to search the site I'm on or the whole web,  and
anyway if I want to use them I'll visit their site, not this one!

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems