Re: The last long steps of the gnome.org website

[Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com>]

Hello,

I am looking at http://wptest.gnome.org/. There has been a huge work done since last time I looked at it, wow! Here are a few quick comments,



In the front page,

For more GNOME news:
I would not point at planet.go in first place, especially for people discovering GNOME it might be confusing. I see planet.go more as "the voice of the community" than a news feed for everybody. Maybe we should point at twitter feed or the whole archive of the main page news, or?


On the bottom links,

The GNOME project
I would rename "teams" to "The GNOME Community" the same way as "The GNOME Foundation". It would include also the people's map, traditional meetings (confs, hackfest), the https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct, link to planet.go etc. So it is more *people* oriented than just a team list.

Products
I would rename "Applications" to "GNOME Applications"

Products / GNOME is free software
I would add a link to a page "GNOME is free software". The page would explain what is free software, link to GPL, LGPL and source code.

Resources
Wikis are used for so many things, I would rename "wiki" to "Live documentation (wiki)"
I would rename "Code hosting" to "[Browse ]GNOME source code"
I would not link to jhbuild, this is pretty hot for a high level entry.

Resources / User support
It think there should be a top level entry, in first place, for users only: "User support". I am a user, I am lost on jhbuild page, where should I go? Documentation, forums, ml, irc, bug reports, etc. The GNOME support portal [1], and the GNOME support Forums [2] are doing a pretty good job here too.

[1] http://gnomesupport.org/
[2] http://gnomesupport.org/forums/
I am not sure who is behind and what is the relation between gnome and gnomesupport though i think they should work hand in hand (or foot in foot?)

News
overall I feel it is missing a place for general news on gnome. Another source for news is footnotes (http://gnomedesktop.org/) which used to do a pretty good job, though seems a bit down recently. Again, foot in foot work would be great!

I would put identi.ca and twitter on the same line, as the content is identi.cal: "GNOME tweets at identi.ca or twitter"


On the language selection:

It is pretty neat :) though I feel it non obvious. map = language? is click-able? I found it by chance. Isn't it all the opposite of GNOME design philosophy? An arrow down would help. Or why not just a simple permanent language list?

Another idea: why not keep this "underground" for developer resource links? And use the grassy middle ground for users, partners and press?
(the separation line could be more like grass/soil with little stones and roots)


GNOME 3.0 Desktop http://wptest.gnome.org/desktop/
I would simplify the first sentence as "Get things done with ease, comfort and control"


<P>aragraphs in general
would be much easier to read if line's width would be much shorter (like in newspapers!) therefore organizing paragraphs in columns or boxes. For example: http://wptest.gnome.org/get-involved/


I could make a more thorough review and also help on content if you like.

Luc

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 01:51, Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:

I won't go about with some kind of inpirational blah-blah-blah about how the last steps of climbing a mountain, when you are closest to the top are the hardest, because I never did that. I saw some dude on TV saying that though.

Anyway.

http://wptest.gnome.org/ is design-wise in a pretty good shape. What's needed right now is taking it the last steps and making it a great website for our great project. For this to happen we need to sharpen the focus of it, make sure the texts and images are good and that everything works as expected when we launch GNOME 3.
There are some darlings to be killed, some very dear ones. But this is needed in order to get the most fundamental parts in place.

The basic navigation would be:
home | about | desktop | applications | developer technologies

Home - (very) Brief introduction, latest news and all that.
About - Our community, history, organization etc.
Desktop - Present shell (pretty much lifting info from http://www.gnome3.org/), Control Center, etc.
Applications - The really cool applications we want to highlight. You know, Banshee, Deja-dup, Gedit and those guys from the GNOME Apps module [1]
Developer  tech - Languages, GTK+, Clutter, Gstreamer, Telepathy and all those guys.

I expect us to figure out the exact subpages along the way, but if these guys are the basis and I want to start in that end. Allan have said he would help with the content, myself will be doing some design stuff and Vdepizzol will be taking care of the translation stuff the following weeks leading up to the GNOME 3 Hackfest in Bangalore. I hope we'll be done with most of the basics by then and are as close to deployment as possible. Final release would be together with GNOME 3 on April 6th.

Me and Allan also created a Etherpad document here:
http://etherpad.tugraz.at/x593dDuQ2C


1. http://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/plain/modulesets/gnome-apps-3.0.modules
- Andreas
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