Ok, based on the very good feedback from Michael I did the following
changes to the main page of the wiki.
* I duplicated the search box to the upper right corner of the page.
Actually if someone could create a opensearch provider that would be great.
* I added links to all the projects to the menu on the right.
Anything else? We'll need to restructure the website somehow to bring
the project names higher up, and provide one-click download links but
I'll look into it probably tomorrow.
Any other feedback ideas? Keep em comming people.
cheers,
Krzysztof
On 1/09/2010 11:27 PM, Michael Maddox wrote:
Comments inline.
2010/9/1 Krzysztof Koźmic<[email protected]>:
Thanks Michael - that's the kind of feedback we're looking for.
1. I agree about the main page. I suck at UI, but I tried to make it a
little bit more accessible by adding the links at the top. I agree
completely though - we should have the links to projects on the left side
menu.
Hmm, now that you point those top links out (on the black background),
I see them. They are basically invisible the way I scan a page. I
can't easily describe why I didn't see them, but maybe it has
something to do with lack of white space in the upper left corner of
the page. I don't know if a bigger font and/or different
foreground/background colors would help, I guess a designer would help
there! ;)
2. Search should be brought to a more visible spot on the page.
It took me a while to find the search box after reading just now that
there was one. Again, I completely missed that it was there and when
looking for a search box, my eyes were much more drawn to the login
combo box in the upper right, which obviously can't be used for
search. In general, I don't trust in-site search and go to Google
anyway, so no big loss for me here.
3. Anything else that you find particularily hard to deal with? And not just
problems - if you have suggestions as well how to improve that - we're all
ears :)
I'm not a UI designer type person at all, so I probably can't help
much more than I already have.
The STW when done will be integrated with the main site (replace it?) so yes
- linking to
http://www.castleproject.org/
is the right thing I guess.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. Hopefully the URL stuff works
itself out eventually.
cheers and thanks again for the feedback.
Krzysztof
On 1/09/2010 8:41 PM, Michael Maddox wrote:
This may come across as complaining, but I'm really just trying to
address Henry's "it seems that people isn't accessing the inner pages
of stw" comment from my personal perspective.
ScrewTurn Wiki, IMHO, has horrible default navigation.
If I go to:
http://stw.castleproject.org/
And look at the left navigation panel, I don't see a link for
ActiveRecord (or anything useful really). In fact, visually scanning
the landing page, it's hard to find the ActiveRecord link.
I think it's not very inviting to users to drill down. I blame this
completely on ScrewTurn Wiki and it's the main reason I won't
recommend that product even though I know it is one of the better .NET
Wikis. The Castle project is the first attempt I've seen to
workaround STW's navigation issues that has had any amount of success
(if I work at it, I can find what I want eventually).
For comparison, if I go to this page:
http://www.castleproject.org/
The projects link at the top seems like the place to find ActiveRecord
and I am rewarded for clicking on it (assuming I don't bother to
scroll down on the first landing page).
Moving on... I find this page:
http://www.castleproject.org/activerecord/documentation/trunk/index.html
Much easier to deal with than this one:
http://stw.castleproject.org/Active%20Record.MainPage.ashx
Although the graphical design of the former helps, I think the
formatting and collection of links could be somewhat replicated in STW
without involving a designer (time and effort not withstanding).
Honestly, as a documentation user, I avoid the STW site if possible
even though I know the content is more likely to be accurate / up to
date, because I find it unpleasant (primarily due to navigation and
incompleteness of the move).
I'm very appreciative of the effort that has gone into the STW site to
date. That said, not enough work has gone into it yet that I will use
it *first*.
One other thing related to the STW site: I'm hesitant to put links to
http://stw.castleproject.org/ on my blog, etc. as I know that URL will
eventually change. I figure the http://www.castleproject.org/ URLs
are safer to link to even though I don't really have any evidence to
support that belief. While you would probably rather I link to the
latest documentation, I'm instead intentionally choosing to link to
what I believe is a more future-proof URL.
-Michael Maddox
http://www.Capprime.com/About.htm
2010/8/31 Henry Conceição<[email protected]>:
No, I'm not. The stw has some link(s) to using. Also there are
bookmarks, blog posts, etc. Even after the link remotion of the using
and the switch to stw, using has almost twice more visitors than stw.
The api site is almost dead, we practically don't receive visitors
there. So it isn't a big deal.
We should only remove the current project main pages after we fix the
wiki layout, imho.
But what concerns me the most, is that it seems that people isn't
accessing the inner pages of stw. I don't know the exact reason: maybe
they googled the wrong result, maybe they couldn't find what they
want, maybe they found it clumsy and left. Check the reports:
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B32splxWlkuqNTdhOWViMmUtYTBjZi00Y2ZhLWJkZGItYTkxYzMwN2U1ZWE2&sort=name&layout=list&num=50
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B32splxWlkuqMTJjOTgwYWUtZjlkZC00NDQ1LWFiZTgtZWU3N2M4ZjQ3ZWJm&sort=name&layout=list&num=50
Cheers,
Henry Conceição
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