Ok, I just spent an hour on the phone with a designer friend. What he convinced me of is that Allan and I were really in agreement. Read on.
Nice! You're really taking this seriously :)
Here's that again: http://hank.org:5000/test1/docs/index.html
phew... I thought you had made *big* changes.
But that's still not enough. Even the light-weight navigation on the left side is in the way to some degree. No getting around that.
Again, the main idea is to make the content flow, from the title to the text.
We tried moving the navigation and search above the title bar. Didn't work.
Tried placing search above the title on the right, and the nav below title on the right. Didn't work, as the right side was way too heavy.
He suggested since the navigation is related to the current page that the navigation could be *in* the title bar on the right side. But our titles are too long, so the title and nav won't fit on the same line.
My he suggested moving the search to the left-hand sidebar. ("Argh, that's where it just came from", I said.)
In short: We felt that this was the best design:
http://hank.org:5000/test3/docs/index.html
Yes, looks pretty good.
because there was the least amount of stuff blocking the path between the title bar and the content.
Here's the closest to the latest design - the navigation widgets bigger/outlined.
http://hank.org:5000/test2/docs/index.html
If the search box goes on the top then we both liked:
http://hank.org:5000/test1/docs/index.html
which is ok too.
- The "mod" part of the logo is a cool gray which blends in with the site. He suggested if that was more of a dirty red (burgundy?) that the logo would stand out. He asked one of his photoshop guys to mock up an example. I doubt anyone is willing to change, since it was voted on, but it might be fun to see. I'll post an example when I get it. He also asked why it was mod_perl in the content and modperl in the logo.....
I think we shouldn't change it too much now... After a long discussion about changing something, we ended up changing nothing. So it'd better stay that way.
- He kept commenting on content, which I kept reminding him that more was to come -- specifically he felt that there needed to be a intro paragraph on some of the top-level pages. Perhaps some common thing (like first char big, or color) might tie things together better.
I'll try to handle that.
- He also commented on the main title in reverse colors is often not as strong as the title that follows. If you look at
http://hank.org:5000/test3/docs/index.html
he claims that people won't see the title, but rather the text
Part I: mod_perl 1.x Documentation
because we are trained (our entire life) to see black text on white background. [I'm not sure that's really a problem.]
It's true, I am more inclined to look at the center instead of the title too. But we shouldn't change it. I think that when people are navigating, one reason they don't look at the title is because they don't have to. They clicked the link, so they *know* what the title is, no need to look again.
Oh, before we talked on the phone today he sent this to me. Stas thought I should post. We don't have to agree or disagree. Just interesting to hear someone's comments:
>One thing that I don't like is the first line "Tons of documentation..." is >receding too much. The line that follows "Part 1..." is bigger, bolder, >louder. So people will tend to skip the first line and go straight to the >sentence that is yelling louder. But I wouldn't start over-bolding the first >line to beat the second. You might be able to adjust by giving the first >line more air - space, above and below. But then every complimentary title >page does not follow that same rule - they should have an intro sentence or >paragraph.
Kind of hard to fix. But, as before, it's sort of a non-issue I think, because we can't really say those paragraphs are very important. The useful things are the links to the documents, and not the words describing those links.
-- Per Einar Ellefsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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