2008/11/24 Scott Ritchie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Jeremy White wrote: >> At Wineconf, we made the decision to change the entry page to the Wine >> web site. The hope was to simplify and stream line it, and to put in >> place the infrastructure to start moving more content to the Wiki. >> >> Jeremy Newman and Jon Parshall have put a lot of time and energy into a >> proposed new design, following what we took away from the meetings at >> Wineconf. >> > > I thought we took away that Dan Kegel would magically pull a design out > of his wizard's hat. Regardless, thanks for doing the work. > >> A mock up of that design is up now here: >> http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/ >> >> ...and the theming intended for all 'child' pages of the web site, >> starting with the Wiki: >> http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/wiki.html >> > > As Wine's unofficial usability evangelist, I present a quick and dirty > review of the new design below. Keep one point in mind: it's much > better, and thank you for getting it done. > >> Beyond the normal controversy that any new design sparks there is one >> major potential controversial change. >> >> That is, I am asking for prime placement on the download page on behalf >> of CodeWeavers instead of the (stale and ugly, sorry) banner ads we used >> in the past. You can see our current concept around that positioning here: >> http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/download.html > > Anything is better than making our website look like it was from 1998. > Perhaps not coincidentally, that's how many people viewed the quality of > our software. > >> I hope that the general community sees that as a reasonable exchange for >> all of the work we put into Wine and hosting the Wine server, and a vast >> improvement over the banner ads. >> >> At any rate, comments and feedback are welcome. > > Good: > * Much friendlier, better looking, easier to focus on what I want. > Looks professional. > * The prominent donate link on the front page is very recognizable. I > guarantee you'll have more donations as a result. > * All the old cruft links are gone. > * The new small icon reflects the main image on the site, and also no > longer has the tiny artifacts that the old one did. Impressive. > > Can be improved with minor tweaks: > * The news should be clickable, and take you to a separate news page > with slightly longer stories. > * Rather than getting smaller when you hover the mouse over the buttons, > it should be the other way around - highlight them and they get bigger > * The slogan "Windows software everywhere" doesn't make much sense. I > would replace it with a very small boilerplate text that says what Wine > does, namely "Wine lets you run Windows applications in Linux and on the > Mac". This summarizes everything for someone visiting the site who has > never heard of Wine before. > * The "Help!" button could be a bit friendlier, eg "Get Help" or > "Support". At the least, drop the exclamation point. > * The text under Donate is obvious, so we can benefit from a bit of > explanation. Something like "Help volunteer Wine developers improve > Wine" -- this also helps sell the donate button > * The text under "Download" could be more extensive too, eg "Get the > latest Wine packaged for your distribution" -- I don't think we lose > much by using a short sentence here since the text is already partially > transparent and optional to read. > * The download icon is weird. A large down arrow would probably be > better than a CD, especially since we don't offer anything CD-like. > * Similarly, using the classic "wrench" icon for development would be a > bit more obvious. As it is now I'm not sure what it means except for > the word development right next to it. > > Bad: > * The inlaid scrollbar under the news tab. However, I think the proper > way to deal with this is to simply have shorter news stories rather than > change the scroll bar. The current sample news (Wine 1.1.7 released), > for instance, could easily be just 2 sentences and a link to the larger > story. Longer stories could be reserved for a separate news page. > >> >> And in a vain attempt to prevent all the flames from scorching Jon and >> Jeremy, I'd like to officially state how much I appreciate their efforts. >> > > It looks really good in general. I'm excited. > > Thanks, > Scott Ritchie > > >
Here's a quick relayout with some of the ideas posted in this thread: http://caih.org/wine/WineHQ.html