Re: Proposed website design

From [email protected] on Sunday, 08 February, 2004:
>> I've had a first bash at a website design.  It's far from finished; most
>> links are broken, the content needs a _lot_ of work and it's all still a
>> bit rough, but I thought I'd show it to get a bit of feedback on what
>> people think of the general look and layout.
>This is very nice work. If I hadn't seen Ryan's "GO" logos I would have
>said this is just we've been looking for. However I really Ryan's work. I
>also really like the "GO" brand. It's very powerful I think. Is there
>someway you can incorporate Ryan's work in your designs?

Sorry; I'm playing catch-up.

I've been working independently on a redesign for gnumeric's site.
  It can be viewed at 
  	http://www.digitasaru.net/gnumericweb-testbed/new-gnumeric/
  It's still in a very early stage, so it's likely to not look the
  best for everybody.  :)
FWIW, the page is XHTML1.0 strict, all layout is done in CSS; 100%
  separation, I think.

I'm very interested in tying all the gnome-office sites together with
  a common theme.  The Office-level stuff ought to be provided in
  a div that can be SSI'ed in to each individual page.  Hmm.  Or the
  files named such that a var can be set (e..g "go-component=gnumeric")
  and the GO layout can be provided with the individual component's
  data located in appropriately named files.

>Cheers
>Martin
>> URL is http://www.burnett-hall.co.uk/~ojbh/testing/gnome-office/.  This
>> is the main page for the suite, I've also done an (even rougher) page
> for Gnumeric - the links should take you there.
>> I've tested the layout on Firebird, Opera and IE6 and it seems to work
>> on all of them.  It's usable on non-CSS browsers (e.g. links), but will
>> probably need some tweaking to cope with IE5.x.
>> I've used Charlie's banner - it's grown on me a lot, and I'm even
>> beginning to think the coloured toes might be a good idea.  The text in
>> the middle of the banner needs to be replaced by an image (transparent
>> GIF or something) to avoid problems with different font sizes.  And I
>> think the banner could do with shrinking vertically a bit; 100 pixels is
>> a bit tall for my tastes.
>>
>> My idea is to have basically the same layout for both the page for the
>> suite and for the applications.  Here's what I'm thinking about for
>> application pages:
>>
>> +----------------------------------------------------------+
>> | GNOME Office icon      Application Name         App icon |
>> +----------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>> +----------------+                             +-----------+
>> | Links to other |     General description     | News list |
>> | GO apps        |     of application          | for this  |
>> |                |                             | app       |
>> | Links specific |     Link to screenshots     |           |
>> | to this app    |                             +-----------+
>> | (docs, install |     Supported platforms
>> | instructions,  |     and languages
>> | etc.)          |
>> +----------------+     Detailed description
>>                        of application features
>>                        latest releases, stable
>>                        and (if applicable)
>>                        development.
>>
>> +----------------------------------------------------------+
>> | Copyright, webmaster contact details                     |
>> +----------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>> The page for the suite will differ slightly in that the links will be to
>> suite-level stuff, the news will include things from all applications
>> and the features section will be brief descriptions the component apps.
>> If you have a look at what I've got up so far then you should get the
>> idea.
>>
>> I think this would be sufficient for an initial revision of the site.
>> Once this is done we could think about maybe adding more
>> marketing-type information - 'Why choose GNOME Office' type stuff, case
>> studies, etc.
>>
>> Initially I was thinking to do this all as static HTML, updating it as
>> needed.  However, XSLT might be a better solution - earlier messages
>> suggested using DocBook and Guide-XML for this but I think they're both
>> way more complicated than we'd need.  All we'd need is a source XML file
>> describing each application's features plus news files and then we'd use
>> transforms to combine them all.

I like static HTML personally, with SSI of the individual pieces
  to help with maintenance (so we don't have to run around updating
  different files to just, say, add a new component).

I'm not familiar with DocBook.  Actually, thinking about it, XSLT
  might be good, too;  just re-generate the whole site.  From a pure
  bandwidth performance perspective, it'd be best to have each global
  div (and all global content) to be in its own iframe or embedded
  HTML document (since it'd then be in cache, and wouldn't have to
  be re-downloaded for each page)).

>> This would make it easier to enforce a consistent layout across
>> different pages, and make sure it's always producing valid HTML.  I've
>> done quite a lot of XSLT in the past, so this won't be a problem - I'll
>> look at producing some stylesheets and XSD files in the next few days.
>> Anyway, please let me know what you think.  I'm thick-skinned enough to
>> cope :)

-- 
Joseph===============================================trelane@digitasaru.net
      Graduate Student in Physics, Freelance Free Software Developer