Le 8 déc. 08 à 15:36, Jesse Ross a écrit : >> 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. > > Awesome -- thanks for taking the time to do this.
Yes :-) >> 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?) > > I think this is a fine idea (particularly pulling content out of > subpages). Feel free to make any of these changes. I can help you if > there are any CSS-related issues that need to be tweaked. I agree that the a h2 combined with a link looks too much like a normal h2. Not really sure how this could be improved though… For the Development section I'm not really convinced by moving the content up from subpages. Well it could make sense for Getting Started/ Involved, but for the other sections, the content will have to be moved back to subpages when they are going to be properly filled. The important goal for this page is to play the role of a menu, so you can quickly know where to go without having to scroll through the content. With the current page, it's possible to see and click every entries of 'Developing with Étoilé' immediately (no scrolling). These entries are the ones that will be used all the time when you write code with or for Étoilé. To illustrate my point, you can take look at the Mac Dev Center that suffers from this issue: http://developer.apple.com/mac/ When you access it, you only see things that don't really matter imho: Featured Content and Software Seeds. The design also wastes a lot of space. The important stuff mainly Reference Library and Getting Started are invisible, only scrolling reveals it. May be I have misunderstood what you suggest though… :-) Another approach to put more content on the Development page could be to use collapsable content in each h2, or to have a skeleton of the organization of the Development section in the sidebar. Alternatively the sidebar could be to outline the main Guides and API References. >> 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/ > > What if, in the upper-right of the home page, we have a link that says > "What is Étoilé?". Clicking on that we have a window that drops down > that has one of those quotes, along with some screenshots, along with > a link to the /etoile page. Thoughts? I like the idea. In addition this link could also be put right on the main picture, in the bottom right part or below 'Étoilé 0.4.0'. >> "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 :) > > Agreed. Yes. >> -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) Could be better. >> -"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)." Yes, this Licensing Philosophy section could be linked near 'Other Policies' on the 'Development' page. >> -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)" > > Feel free to make all of the above changes. Agreed. I'm in favor of moving these explanations into the 'Other Policies' page. We'll probably add the Release check list to it at a later point. >> -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. > > Not a nitpick, that's definitely an issue. I'm not sure of the best > way to handle this in SVN, but my suggestion would be to just > eliminate the 0.3 folder level entirely... so instead of /etoile/0.3/ > features, we would have /etoile/features. I was thinking it would be a > good idea to be able to track previous versions of Étoilé, but I think > in the long run that would be more trouble than it's worth. Eric, if > you want to pull everything up a level and eliminate the 0.3, that > would be excellent. Yes. >> 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. > > [snip] > /dev/contribute should only be the "Hack It" section of that page... > "Get It" should be removed. Sounds reasonable. > /dev/install should be what it is, just the installation instructions > > /downloads is also fine, I think. > >> -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. > > Yep -- the sidebar is another thing I plan on reworking. Again, a > couple of weeks. Let me think about where the best place for Languages > to live (and Io should really be removed until we have a working > version that lives on top of the Obj-C runtime) Ideally, I'd like to have a tree representation of the Development section in the sidebar. For Languages, we could rename Developer Tools to Languages & Developer Tools? >> 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 :) > > Totally agree. I think we may want to rethink the entirety of the / > etoile page, and get some of that content into that section. Yes. Tthe old wiki had some content we miss. If someone is interested to bring some content, I can give him access to the wiki. We could also link the GNA interview, Jesse's mockups, Michal Cap's thesis and Brian Muhumuza pages if they agree. http://jesseross.com/blog/2007/03/30/new-etoile-mockups/ http://www.capino.cz/etoile/ http://jesseross.com/blog/2007/03/30/new-etoile-mockups/ http://brian.muhumuza.googlepages.com/object-manager.html http://brian.muhumuza.googlepages.com/working_with_objects.html Cheers, Quentin. _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
