Re: New Website proposal (mockup)

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sat, 2006-04-29 at 14:05 -0500, Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> On 4/27/06, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> > You should feel free, but try to restrict yourself to just changing the
> > CSS and graphics, to keep the task simple for now.
> >
> > If you need to, of course, you can change the classes and IDs in the
> > HTML, so you can do CSS things with them, if that's not too difficult.
> >
> > >   Do you just want a design update
> > > or do you want an update and re-organization of the information at the
> > > same time?
> >
> > Feel free to make suggestions, but I consider that a separate task.
> 
> Well, I was playing around with some design ideas and found I really
> wanted to simplify and re-organize the page a bit.  So I thought I'd
> throw a few ideas out for discussion.  It's just a rough gimp mockup
> for now.  There's no actual html / css written yet.
> 
> http://download.gna.org/colorscheme/etc/gtkmm.org/gtkmm-mockup.png

That looks generally more modern. Here are some random thoughts:

> I figured that although the website is for gtkmm, glibmm, and gnomemm,
> the main focus is really gtkmm,

Yeah, there's no need to have gnomemm, glibmm, and libsigc++ there. We
should just mention them in the description of gtkmm.

>  so that's why it's sort of
> 'highlighted' in blue in my mockup.  In addition, I'm assuming that
> the most common action for website visitors will be downloading gtkmm,

I don't think that's true, and it's not something that we should
encourage. People should install the official distro packages.

> so I have a large download button on the front page.  I also made a
> simplified header bar that will be used on all pages to replace the
> current sidebar.  The header bar has just a few broad categories
> instead of a relatively long list of really specific items that we
> currently have in the sidebar.  The idea is that some of these
> specific links might be moved off of the front page menu into a
> subpage -- I'm not exactly sure yet, these are just initial thoughts.

I think that a "Contact" page needs to be very easy to find.

> I tried to keep the basic color scheme,

We are not tied to the color scheme. We might want to use something more
similar to the GNOME web site.

>  but it's slightly modified
> (i.e. there's a new light blue and a light brown / tan), and the
> 'logo' is not used at all in the mockup.  I just couldn't find a good
> place to fit it in.  If people want to keep it though, I can try to
> find some way to use it. I also incorporated a few enlarged
> tango-style icons into the design, though I'm not completely sure
> about those yet...  The idea is that the big icon in the upper-right
> will be different depending on what page of the website you're on. 
> For example, the download page might look something like this:
> 
> http://download.gna.org/colorscheme/etc/gtkmm.org/gtkmm-mockup-downloads.png
> 
> So I'm hoping to get some feedback.  Feel free to be as critical as
> you want, the more specific the better.  I won't start implementing
> anything until there appears to be at least a rough consensus.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jonner
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com