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Re: Website proposal for usability

On 12/08/10 11:02, Devin Samarin wrote:

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 1:50 AM, Martyn Russell<martyn lanedo com>  wrote:

So my comments:



4. The "Downloads" page feels the wrong way round to me. I always prefer
more content on the left side where there are multiple columns - must be
my OCD kicking in ;) can we switch these around?


I had it the other way before I just changed it :P Swapped.
I don't know if it looks good either way, maybe I'll just remove the columns?
Actually, I quite like that idea of removing the columns. If we do that, I would put the "stable" downloads first. 


b) the shadow on the git commands don't look good hear, I would prefer
it was the way we had it before to be honest. As it currently looks it
feels like I need new glasses :P


Haha ok. I made it look like it was before, except the text is just a
little bigger.
I see you updated it, but to be honest, I still prefer the way it was. The black background for the git commands really feels like a terminal and that's what I love about it. It looks as I would use it. The font as it is now is just too subtle 


5. The "Screenshots" page has an odd number of images, I would prefer
this to look like a grid, so we should either remove the Windows image
at the bottom or find 2 more to go beside it.


Right now it's not layed-out like a grid, so in some browsers you see
four in a row... I'll fix that later so I make sure that it will work
in all browsers.


Great.


7. The "Success Stories" page has a heading "More Applications" which
should really be under all the grey boxes. The Maemo and GNOME
paragraphs should line up too IMO (vertically). Arguably Maemo should be
changed to MeeGo everywhere.


Okay I made the "More applications" box into a 'bubble', but I've left
the name of it as a header. What do you think?
It looks a bit out of place if I am honest. The title is blue which is the same as the larger titles at the top while confusing the situation by placing it in a bubble.
I think I would prefer it was a regular heading like the ones at the top. Perhaps also changing the title to "Community Applications" since gtkfiles.org is more about that really. 


They aren't lining up because the GNOME logo is taller than the Maemo
logo... Fixed.


Great, looks much better now.


8. The "OverView" page has the same indentation issue with the icons.
And the columns look a lot closer than say the Downloads page, this
again triggers my OCD :)


Well they are actually exactly the same :P... It probably looks like
that because the text is crammed together... I added space to the list
of libraries, but I don't know if it really helped. Maybe I can put
that into a sidebar bubble?
Hmm, not sure that would work. This is the fundamental part of this page. Additionally, the icon top is still higher than the text and that should be aligned if possible. 


b) I don't really prefer the new logo/text to the old one. The icon is
too small and the text looks better as a raised+shadow text IMO. I see
what you're doing there with the height to make the space more useful,
but I think the icon would look better the height of the text and
left/right of it. Or perhaps even behind the text as some sort of
transparent image? Not sure. It just feels left wanting.


Okay, I was trying to be a little creative with that but I'll try
other ways like the way you mentioned. I agree with Alberto that the
name of the toolkit is not obvious enough. I'll change it.
This is true. Perhaps a subtext in the title mentioning "*G*IMP *T*ool*K*it". At the very least explaining this on the front page makes sense.
I also like what you did with the shade difference in the background there ;) 


c) The border widths around the page were chunky, which I liked, not
sure yet if I like the new thinner look. More content is visible sure,
but I just wonder if it looks right.


I just don't think GTK+ is very chunky..


I am getting used to the current width though ;)


d) I prefer the title in Red rather than Blue, it looks more colourful,
cheerful, etc.


I kinda disagree here too because the color red makes people more
tense as opposed to a calming blue...
That's one way of looking at it, my way is, it looks more bland and less expressive. To use the BBC as an example again, their site has much more colour on it and I like that. It does make it harder to get the balance right, but I think it is worth it. 


I also think the blue goes very
well with the grey, and when I think of GTK+ I think of clearlooks for
some reason and clearlooks doesn't have any red in it :P
I agree, it does go quite well, but splashing another colour in there (especially one of the colours used in the icon above) still has a synergy about it which I like.
Can we try it at least for a short time? Perhaps others can comment on this to get more feedback. 


I agree. I think at the time, the question was if PHP was available on
the web server. I don't think this is a problem now. Should check this
though.


PHP is already used to get the feeds from blogs.gnome.org/gtk/ and
display them in the recent site. If it didn't support PHP, I wouldn't
have started to make a new design, since it would make it much more
difficult to make it look a certain way across all pages. (template)


Ah yea, that's true, I forgot about that. My brain is stuck in the past ;)


So a couple of other things.

- I would like Andreas to at least comment here, I have CC'd him.
- Are the pages XHTML validated? The current side is and I would like to
try and keep it that way. Same goes for the CSS.


I don't think you can have valid XHTML when using Conditional Comments
for IE... but I know the home page on the current site is not valid
since the feed that it gets the news from has some errors in it. It's
possible to have PHP tidy it up with DOM support and cache it for
speed, but the PHP on the server might not support it. I'll check the
pages for validity.
Apart from the obvious violations sure, but fixable issues should at least be processed. 


On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 2:40 AM, Alberto Ruiz<aruiz gnome org>  wrote:



The chosen font, Charcoal, comes from apple and as far as I know it
does not come with any Linux distro that I'm aware of. An open font
would be better. We tend to use Bitstream Vera Sans within the GNOME
brand.


I just have Charcoal there so that if the machine supports it, it will
show it, otherwise it will show the next in-line. I actually don't
have Bitstream Vera Sans on my Ubuntu computer. I can change it if you
would like.


I agree.


Vinicius, can you post somewhere the template you've been work at so
that we can coordinate our efforts with the awesome work Devin has
been doing?


I would also like to see :)


Yes please :)

--

A final note, from today, just the last things that are niggling me :)
- The text under headings like "Where can I use it?" on the main page are all indented for some reason and it really shouldn't be. It looks out of place to me.
- As said previously, the git commands should have a black background I think as they were.
- 2 more images on the screenshots page would be nice (perhaps some more up to date ones?) to make it look like a table of images. The bottom row looks a bit out there on its own right now.
- I would perhaps rearrange the Development page a little, but having in the sidebar: "Bug Reporting", moving the "Best Practices" out to the main page, moving "Donations" down to the bottom of the page and moving "Language Bindings" to the main part of the page. When I think about what would be accessed quickly from that page, it is usually things like, reporting a bug, looking in the wiki, writing to a mailing list. The rest is not really something that is done that frequently IMO.
- The "Platforms" page for "Success Stories" should really have MeeGo in there I think. It should also include the N900 under the "Maemo" section.
- The "Downloads" page doesn't have the unstable tarballs listed there, the "unstable" part of the page should perhaps be renamed to "Bleeding Edge" :) since we do actually have unstable tarballs too. 

--

Looks great though, would love to move to this new design soon.

--
Regards,
Martyn
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