Re: [Freevo-devel] freevo website

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 07:44:36 -0700


On 16 Oct 2005, at 14:45, Jason Tackaberry wrote:

On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 14:27 +0100, John Molohan wrote:

Just taking a quick look and it strikes me that the Freevo logo is 
taking up the first 25 - 30% of the viewable screen area. From a 
usability point of view it'd be better to make more use of this space 
and incorporate the logo elsewhere (and or resize it).


Agreed.  This is prime real-estate, and as much as I like the new logo,
it shouldn't occupy that much of the above-the-fold area.

I'm trying to keep this somewhat consistent with other modern OSI sites,


If you look at the old freevo site, you'll see that this 'prime real estate' is also wasted. It uses 150px but the idea is to stand out. Also, I want the use of space to be very intentional, I don't want to cram too much information into each page, instead stay on topic and relevant to each page. If you look through pages About Freevo -> A Freevo system, Features you'll see that the content works in the format. Making the site too busy will detract from the content, so keeping it simple like this allows users to browse a large volume of content without ever feeling crowded with links.

The image will get crammed, I'll be fitting it into about 130px including the top menu. Also the top menu items will change slightly over time.

I am going to overlay the logo a little, it will slightly encroach on the menu, that way using a little less space. This requires a serious look at the css, and also I must use a DX filter so I don't exclude microsoft ie users. 

Also the background of this header space will be a repeating image, a roll of film and a gentle colour variance. at least I hope it works when I've done the image.


Also, the top navbar items hover differently than the left navbar.  This
is obviously intentional, but I think all these menu items should
prelight in a consistent way.  The layout is also fixed-width, so the
site doesn't scale well on high resolution displays.  

Agreed that the highlight should be the same, what I need is a set of colours to make this work correctly. 

The site is still reasonable on 1600x1200 but websites should ALWAYS be designed to work on low res displays, think page not screen! I've specifically designed the site to work at 800x600 so it is easily viewable on a freevo box running firefox on a tv.

A variable width page wouldn't look as good, and i'd have to use tables to get the layout working, which i would prefer not to do. 

There is currently a turn toward this style of deliberate layout on a lot of sites at the moment. The rule is generally if your left hand menu fits in the height with the header then the site is working. you shouldn't need to scroll for the menu.



I can't say I'm terribly fond of the palette used.  I think the blue of
the menus a bit overpowering.  However, that's more a subjective comment
that isn't very meaningful. :)

Agreed the colours are crap, this is intentional... I'm trying to irritate people enough so that they start to suggest a reasonable palette! ;) I'm gonna look at some paletting sites which are very helpful as they generally have complimentary colour pickers.

Regards,
  Karl

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