Re: [gentoo-dev] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[kang <kang@gentoo.org>]

Carsten Lohrke wrote:

>I have to say I'm somewhat disappointed by what I see compared to Aarons 
>proposed look¹. 
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Agreed!

>a) Regarding the space below the two horizontal menus: A continuous image 
>looks much better than these "cells" with a lot of useless and redundant 
>links above them. If you think the space is wasted - well then drop it at all 
>or make the image a small bar so there's more place for imformation.
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Agreed: the cells are harder to read too, in fact, i think people will
not read any but visually skip them.
So might as well remove them completely.
This said, a design is not just a color theme and a few logo images.
When you remove parts or change them too much, the whole design gets
down. That's probably why we're disappointed vs the original design.
The big image was not just to be visually attractive but also makes the
bridge with the advertisement bar in the original design, for example.
I think it's one of the real major issues.

>b) Adverts: Title them as what they are and draw a line between contents and 
>adverts. The way it is now is very unfriendly to the reader.
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I think the original design did that nicely.

>c) The cow pictogram and the text beside it is completely superfluous.
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This stuff could be put into the higher "cell/image" stuff, but nicer
(aka fitting the current design), IMHO. This would solve two issues too ;)

>e) I like the thre vertical menus with the pictres above them. But from a 
>usability point of view it's really questionable to expect a first time user 
>finds them instantly when there's so much information on the front page that 
>he has to scroll down. Either limit the information and make an extra news 
>page (including searchable archive, that's missing atm.) or drop these menus 
>at all.
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I think they're only useably in the original design point of view:
You *MUST* *SEE* the boxes when you load the page. If you have to scroll
down, it's void, bad, wrong, should be
changed/fixed/made_another_way/removed.

>f) Handbook and other links: Usually you want to read the page and not 
>metadata about it. The summary/date/author part takes too much place and the 
>title is redundant. Make that a box next to the title or what else, but don't 
>let the first action a user has to do instead to read to press scroll down.
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I don't know. i think boxes should be a bit avoided.
It looks ok on most pages [
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml ], only has a problem
when we have a billion of authors/editors [
http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml ]
Maybe if alignement was less messy it would be still acceptable.

However, the title is, 100% redundant.



A few last things:
- On firefox/linux, at least, the right spacing is way too big. It looks
like a right column is missing, while there is no rigth column. Original
design had a way smaller spacing.

- "Older news" looks missaligned for the probably same reason

-the bottom/footer image grey "overline" is more dark above the
"www@gentoo.org" url.
This is from the base design because of the ads boxes design. Either
implement the original ads design (good good! i like it! haha), either
just make it normal i guess :)


Ok, else it's a nice start. I just hope most things get fixed and that
it looks a bit more like original.
Congrats on the long work :)

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