> Recently I've been thinking about possible ways of improving the > website. This is my attempt to collect them all in one place and share > them.
Awesome -- thanks for taking the time to do this. > General: > ---------------- > - I find pages with a lot of H2 headings (like Development) can be > hard to read. It amounts to a menu with large descriptions for each > item. > How about moving up content from subpages, and where a subpage is > necessary, make the link + description look less similar to headers > which are a title for content on the same page. (maybe link headers > followed by descriptions could be rearranged to have the description > on the same line?) I think this is a fine idea (particularly pulling content out of subpages). Feel free to make any of these changes. I can help you if there are any CSS-related issues that need to be tweaked. > Front page: > ---------------- > - I think the front page should have a concise description of what the > project is, since that's probably the most important thing we have to > communicate. I like David's and Jesse's quotes from the gna.org > interview - > "We are a group of people who have all come to the conclusion that > modern computer systems are almost unusable - hacks piled on top of > hacks to produce a design and an interface with very little thought > for what a regular user wants to do. The purpose of Étoilé is to do > something about this problem." > or > "Étoilé is a Desktop Environment that focuses on components, > workflows, and collaboration. It's about simplifying, streamlining, > and sharing. " > > This could be followed by a "Read more.." link which points to > http://etoileos.com/etoile/ What if, in the upper-right of the home page, we have a link that says "What is Étoilé?". Clicking on that we have a window that drops down that has one of those quotes, along with some screenshots, along with a link to the /etoile page. Thoughts? > - Maybe have a list of the last 4 or 5 news post titles? Yes -- this was always intended to be added in, but I haven't done it. I'll try to prioritize it and get it done in the next couple of weeks. > "Etoile" section: > ---------------- > - I think the purpose of this page should be to expand on the concise > description of Etoile on the front page to give the reader a good > understanding of the whole project (as much as possible in one page :) Agreed. > -I would get rid of the "Read more" link and put the expanded overview > right in http://etoileos.com/etoile/. (as it is now, anyway, I don't > think there's enough to warrant a separate page) > -"Licensing philosophy" could be moved to the Development section, and > we could just have a one line summary like "We prefer the BSD or MIT > X11 license for Etoile code, with the GNU LGPL also being acceptable. > See Licensing Philosophy for details (in the development section)." > > -I think the release numbering system details is too verbose for a > page designed to describe details of what Etoile is, maybe release > numbering details belongs in Development. How about a short status > message instead, along the lines of "The current Etoile release is > 0.4.0, a developer preview of our frameworks. We plan our next major > release, 0.5.0, will be a preview of our vision in a form which users > can try. (see release numbering system in developer section)" Feel free to make all of the above changes. > -"Features" should be a H1 heading and "Core Object" should be H2, > right? Yes, fixed now. Not sure what happened there... > -a nitpick, but most of the links on this page point to but > http://etoileos.com/etoile/0.3/.. and reference 0.3 in the page > titles.. just changing these to 0.4 would be good. Not a nitpick, that's definitely an issue. I'm not sure of the best way to handle this in SVN, but my suggestion would be to just eliminate the 0.3 folder level entirely... so instead of /etoile/0.3/ features, we would have /etoile/features. I was thinking it would be a good idea to be able to track previous versions of Étoilé, but I think in the long run that would be more trouble than it's worth. Eric, if you want to pull everything up a level and eliminate the 0.3, that would be excellent. > Downloads section: > ---------------- > -The "Etoile" header which links to > http://etoileos.com/downloads/etoile/ should probably be removed - > that page refers to 0.2. Fixed. > News section > ---------------- > At some point I guess we'll need to split this in to multiple pages. > How about a list of all news post titles on the right sidebar, in > addition to the SVN commit logs? Yep -- I want to rework the whole News section at some point too. I have some ideas, I just need to build it out. Again, probably in the next couple of weeks. > Development section: > ---------------- > > -These pages: > http://etoileos.com/dev/start/ > http://etoileos.com/dev/contribute/ > http://etoileos.com/dev/install/ > http://etoileos.com/downloads/ > contain roughly the same information - I can see that in the future > they can have different roles, but it could be confusing right now. Yeah -- there was a bit of future-proofing that we tried to do. What we should really do is this: /dev/start should have a link to download, a link to install, then instructions on what to do once you have a system set up (perhaps tutorials or things to explore). This page should really be a one-stop- shop for the basics of using Étoilé as a developer. /dev/contribute should only be the "Hack It" section of that page... "Get It" should be removed. /dev/install should be what it is, just the installation instructions /downloads is also fine, I think. > -I always forget about/don't notice the "Languages", "Io", > "Smalltalk", "ObjC" sections in the sidebar. Maybe these should be in > the main column, and the sidebar should be only used for things like > screenshots, additional details/links, or an index into content > already in the main column. Yep -- the sidebar is another thing I plan on reworking. Again, a couple of weeks. Let me think about where the best place for Languages to live (and Io should really be removed until we have a working version that lives on top of the Obj-C runtime) > Other comments: > ----------- > I would like to help get more content about user experience plans back > (since we don't really have much/any at the moment) and updated > (that's the harder part :) - I think this is a task to do before 0.5 > that may not have been mentioned in the previous email thread. Reading > those pages on the old wiki (even if they were sketches and works in > progress) were largely what made me interested in Etoile :) Totally agree. I think we may want to rethink the entirety of the / etoile page, and get some of that content into that section. J. _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list Etoile-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
