allan wrote:
hi stas
Stas Bekman wrote:
All the features are cool (snipped), but these:
- body bgcolor is white (a very light gray might work)
> - no borders around content box and generally more white space
this page design looses the focus of the content box. If you put the older design and this one next to each other, you will probably see that the older one is easier to read.
In fact when I first saw your new design, I didn't like it at all, now I realize that this was because I felt lost in the page. Now I see that it's good, but the content box and contrasting bg are definitely making the pages harder to read.
<!-- eh, you mean the content box and contrasting bg [of the original design] are definitely making the pages _easier_ to read, right? -->
IMHO, yes.
well, granted, the content looses a little focus beeing
box-border-less. i dont mind that at all. in fact i regard
it as feature (!). when i surf a site (that i have never
visited before) the most important thing focus-wise for me
is in a way not the content but the navigation. can you follow me? i mean, there is no way (in either
design) that you feel lost (navigation-wise) at anytime - on
the contrary.
true, if you navigate a lot. This is not the case with perl.apache.org -- here you spend most of the time sitting in one place and reading the docs. Remember this is not a shopping cart kind of site.
We want to have the best experience for people using our site. And most users will spend their time in /docs
Moreover since the amount of documentation is huge and growing, navigation will be hardly used at all inside /docs, because most users will use search to get to the item they want.
Once I reach the item that I want to read, I want to keep focused on it.
so from a user-friendly perspective i think this design is in fact better because focus is withdrawn fron the content. no-one in the world would (in either design) be uncertain of what is content and what is navigation and what is ad(-ons). some sites have so many boxes that its hard to seperate functionality sometimes.
I guess it all depends on your definition of user-friendly-ness, placed into the certain context. Remember that we don't try to design a generic site, but a special purpose site.
- menu-text centered (this looks strangely enough better IMO)
I think this is not user-friendly. An English speaking person's eye is accustomed to read left to right, so by centralizing the menu you create an obstacle.
yes, it probably is not user-friendly but on the other hand not exactly hostile either :-) its not like the menu takes up a lot of words and space. to me this particular issue wrt the menu is a very small sacrifice. btw, if you turn off stylesheets its in fact more user-friendly than the original design IMO.
But why? because it looks fancier? Why do you want users to turn CSS off?
I think that trying to put the download widget in the same line with prev|next is a better idea. Also remember that we will have a search link (which will take users directly to the search of the current doc). So I believe that packing these into one widget with big spaces between will make a great navigation function.
[pdf|src] [search] [prev|up|next]
yes, sounds cool. but pretty hard (impossible) to do without using tables or a
fixed-sized space between the functions. i imagine the above:
[pdf|src] left-aligned [search] centered [prev|up|next] right-aligned
or the whole bar right-aligned and fixed space:
|topbar span | ....[pdf|src] 150px [search] 150px [prev|up|next]
the first choice looks best.
agreed, any fixed sizes are bad in the long run.
May be I lost part of the tablelessness track, but I thought that the point was not to use tables for page layout. Does this widget fall into the same category? If not tables can perfectly fit here, no?
BTW, getting back to the depth issues, look at this site: http://www.google.com/services/free.html
They use a 3d image to create a feeling of vollume and they still have a very thing vertical bar to separate the content from the navigation
_____________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ticketmaster.com http://apacheweek.com http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
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