Raphael made a number of excellent points regarding
the site redesign. I'd like to reiterate some of
them and add something.
|* The new layout should not break the existing URLs. Many people have
| bookmarked some pages on www.gimp.org, and many web sites have
| direct links to the download pages, to the documentation or to the
| mailing lists page. So even if the navigation system is redesigned,
| there should still be something available from the same URLs as
| today.
|
|* The design should be fast and clean. It should support all browsers
| and should not make excesssive use of nested tables or JavaScript.
| The current design of www.gimp.org is OK from that point of view.
| But on the other hand, the GUG site is taking too long to render in
| Netscape 4 (2-3 seconds of delay for re-displaying any page, because
| of the nested tables).
They should also work if JavaScript is not available. Links
should be links - not JS calls!
|* The site should not use cookies unless there is a real need for
| them. For example, if the site is built with PHP then it should not
| use the session-id cookies or any other user-tracking cookies. This
| is not needed and it annoys the users who have configured their
| browser to warn them when the server wants to set a cookie.
|
|* The pages should be easy to bookmark and the URLs should not be too
| long. This means that frames are forbidden, and the systems that
| generate dynamic contents using horribly long URLs should also be
| avoided (see the bad examples from Corel below).
I work for a software company whose products handle content management,
personalization, etc. [It doesn't run on linux, and it's much more
complex and resource intensive than we need, so I haven't pursued
trying to get a copy.] I've worked on the GUI, in professional services
doing work for clients and in applications. The above points turn out
to be absolutely critical if you want a really useful site for the vast
majority of users - especially if you care about a wide cross-section
of users from techiphobes to technophiles.
And while I know this is a mind-boggling concept, we should
make sure the pages work even if there is no image delivery.
-Miles
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