[www-redesign] a couple of comments

["Aaron Shi" <aaron@aaronshi.com>]

Wow, took a quick peek and everything looks much nicer.

A couple of things (here it goes):

--1--
> When I saw the e-mail icon next to the print icon, my first 
> thought was that it was a "send-a-link" button, since that's 
> pretty common on news sites.  Having it represent a mailto: 
> link instead might be potentially confusing.  Anybody else think that?

It is misleading and counter intuitive.  The original reference was for
"send-a-link," but to do that it requires javascript and hence that's
probably why it was changed to a static mailto: link.

--2--
> There are a few other minor changes as well. Link colors have 
> been made more consistant: purple on white for content areas 
> and white on purple in the menu bar. All links turn green on 
> :hover. These color combinations pass the color-blind test, 
> look really good and are consistant. 

The green was intended for on the dark purple background on the top bar or
bolded text headings.  It is not intended for unbold non-heading text on
white background or on light purple background (especially hard to see, e.g.
hover ad links on the ad bar).  Also, the ad images have dotted underlines
under them, they shouldn't.

--3--
> The top level menu (main, planet, forums, etc...) had an 
> issue. The green arrow designates which site you are on. If 
> you are on planet.gentoo.org then PLANET would be first in 
> line with the green arrow. I spaced the first word out more 
> to make it more obvious. The link colors were changed to 
> white with green hover to be consistant with the site-wide 
> color scheme and also to pass the color blind test.

Hmm...we shouldn't changed the menu order on the users.  It creates
confusion and slows down the workflow because they'd have to double-check
the position of the links before clicking due to them changing.  How about,
current site = white link, other sites = dimmer (i.e. light purple).  Also
the green arrow doesn't vertically align with the text as in the reference,
not sure why merely changing colors would also change the positioning.  The
font looks a tad different, maybe that's why.

--4--
> I like this version much better. It's all coming together, and 
> I give my thumbs up for a release of this as soon as the minor 
> bugs are worked out. (Not like it matters, but as an average gentoo 
> user, I applaud you, and everyone else!) 

> Yes, let's see this before X-Mas 2005! It would be a nice X-mas 
> present to the community!

I'd strong advise against releasing an unpolished product and patching up
known-bugs later (i.e. pull a Microsoft).  Since this is a major event,
there will undoubtly be additional coverage and it would not look good if we
launched it at sub par quality (Gentoo critics would totally capitalize on
it).

--5--
> Chapters are the green and a larger font size and sections 
> are dark purple and a little smaller. It looks good at the 
> moment and (more or
> less) matches the reference design.

Looks good, my only concern with this and the other color changes is where
the colors came from.  Are they part of the color scheme?  The dark purple
sub headings, while the text is of higher contrast (is it necessary?), it
over shadows the green heading (even though the green heading is larger),
this is because the apparent brightness is inconsistent.  The purple in the
reference looks more balanced.  The headings (green, purple, and doc heading
at top in the light purple box) could be a little bigger as our default text
is bigger.

--6--
On the front page, there's a light purple space below between the content
area and the footer bar.  To the right of the line where it says "#103610 -
yaboot-static claims incorrectly that /proc/device-tree broken is in the
2.6.12 kernel series", the ad bar is shifted by 1 pixel to the right (this
is barely noticeable but very odd).

--7--
The front page looks over crowded, I think this is mostly a spacing issue
(or lack of).  Giving the purple bar headings a padding and putting more
space between each news item may help a little temporarily.  The "More News"
link needs to be more prominent, right now it just looks like part of the
last news item.

--etc.--
The table borders might look better in a purple (right now it appears black
or very dark gray).  

The XML buttons have dotted underlines, within a sentence it looks okay, but
on its own it looks strange (the underline sticks right to the bottom of it,
essentially same problem as ad images).  This is probably a line height
issue.

The ad column's purple doesn't quite match the light gray portion on the
footer which connects to it.  The purple looks nice too, I can probably
change the footer graphic later to match the purple.



Overall good work Curtis, this is coming together nicely! The progress has
been huge in the last couple of weeks.


Aaron

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