Øystein Grøvlen wrote: > Jean T. Anderson wrote: > ... > If you look at the home pages for Torque or PostgreSQL you immediately > get the feeling that these are home pages for a software products. I > think our homepage more gives the impression of being a home page for a > development project. I think this is the wrong approach. Our "front > page" should focus on attracting users of Derby. The heading "The > Apache Derby Project" appeals more to potential developers of Derby. > > Some suggestions: > - The header should only say "Apache Derby".
great idea. > - A table of contents make the page pretty dull. I think the fact that > we feel we need a TOC indicates that there are probably too much stuff > on the front page. (If you look at the Postgres front page, it is > mostly links to other pages.) forrest, the software used for generating the site, automatically generates that TOC -- and I agree there's too much on this page, especially since I added the "What is Derby?" and "Downloads" sections. :-) The charter itself belongs in a different page that is linked to from this one. If there are no objections, I'll go ahead and make that change sometime soon. > - I do not know what is technically possible, but having more columns > will bring more information to the top of the page. At least on my > laptop, I still have to scroll down to find the link to downloads and > the news. > - The fact that people are not able to find downloads in the menu on the > left side, indicates that something is probably wrong with the design. > Maybe the text is to small and does not show well due to the background > color. The page layout (including the menu and tabs) depends on the forrest skin used. Right now the default skin is in place. Anyone should feel free to test/develop/suggest other skins, keeping in mind that Derby is using forrest 0.7 -- details are at http://db.apache.org/derby/papers/derby_web.html . For example, ddlutils and ojb use a different skin but if I remember right both those sites are at forrest 0.6: see http://db.apache.org/ddlutils/ , http://db.apache.org/ojb/ . So just stick to forrest 0.7 features. at any rate, if anyone wants to suggest a new skin, that'd be great -- go for it! -jean
