Hey, Recently I've been thinking about possible ways of improving the website. This is my attempt to collect them all in one place and share them.
General: ---------------- - I find pages with a lot of H2 headings (like Development) can be hard to read. It amounts to a menu with large descriptions for each item. How about moving up content from subpages, and where a subpage is necessary, make the link + description look less similar to headers which are a title for content on the same page. (maybe link headers followed by descriptions could be rearranged to have the description on the same line?) Front page: ---------------- - I think the front page should have a concise description of what the project is, since that's probably the most important thing we have to communicate. I like David's and Jesse's quotes from the gna.org interview - "We are a group of people who have all come to the conclusion that modern computer systems are almost unusable - hacks piled on top of hacks to produce a design and an interface with very little thought for what a regular user wants to do. The purpose of Étoilé is to do something about this problem." or "Étoilé is a Desktop Environment that focuses on components, workflows, and collaboration. It's about simplifying, streamlining, and sharing. " This could be followed by a "Read more.." link which points to http://etoileos.com/etoile/ - Maybe have a list of the last 4 or 5 news post titles? "Etoile" section: ---------------- - I think the purpose of this page should be to expand on the concise description of Etoile on the front page to give the reader a good understanding of the whole project (as much as possible in one page :) -I would get rid of the "Read more" link and put the expanded overview right in http://etoileos.com/etoile/. (as it is now, anyway, I don't think there's enough to warrant a separate page) -"Licensing philosophy" could be moved to the Development section, and we could just have a one line summary like "We prefer the BSD or MIT X11 license for Etoile code, with the GNU LGPL also being acceptable. See Licensing Philosophy for details (in the development section)." -I think the release numbering system details is too verbose for a page designed to describe details of what Etoile is, maybe release numbering details belongs in Development. How about a short status message instead, along the lines of "The current Etoile release is 0.4.0, a developer preview of our frameworks. We plan our next major release, 0.5.0, will be a preview of our vision in a form which users can try. (see release numbering system in developer section)" -"Features" should be a H1 heading and "Core Object" should be H2, right? -a nitpick, but most of the links on this page point to but http://etoileos.com/etoile/0.3/.. and reference 0.3 in the page titles.. just changing these to 0.4 would be good. Downloads section: ---------------- -The "Etoile" header which links to http://etoileos.com/downloads/etoile/ should probably be removed - that page refers to 0.2. News section ---------------- At some point I guess we'll need to split this in to multiple pages. How about a list of all news post titles on the right sidebar, in addition to the SVN commit logs? Development section: ---------------- -These pages: http://etoileos.com/dev/start/ http://etoileos.com/dev/contribute/ http://etoileos.com/dev/install/ http://etoileos.com/downloads/ contain roughly the same information - I can see that in the future they can have different roles, but it could be confusing right now. -I always forget about/don't notice the "Languages", "Io", "Smalltalk", "ObjC" sections in the sidebar. Maybe these should be in the main column, and the sidebar should be only used for things like screenshots, additional details/links, or an index into content already in the main column. Other comments: ----------- I would like to help get more content about user experience plans back (since we don't really have much/any at the moment) and updated (that's the harder part :) - I think this is a task to do before 0.5 that may not have been mentioned in the previous email thread. Reading those pages on the old wiki (even if they were sketches and works in progress) were largely what made me interested in Etoile :) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
