At 17:37 11/10/1999 -0400, Alex Schmelkin wrote:
>While I'm sure Matt Arnold's effort to redesign perl.apache.org is greatly
>appreciated by everyone on this list, it seems to me that a bit more
>preparation and interface design should actually go into the final product.
Indeed. I know the current site quite well as I spend a lot of time there,
but the lack of easy navigation makes it a less valuable resource in that
too much thought is spent on "How do I get there ?" (No offense to whoever
is presently maintaining this site, taking care of a site can be a lot of
work and simply adding new links now and then is already much appreciated).
> 1. What browsers are different percentages of your user populations using?
> 2. What screen resolutions are different percentages of your user
>populations using?
> 3. What purpose will the site serve - simply providing information, or a
>marketing/evangelical need? How important are each of these considerations?
> 4. Who is the ultimate audience? - Who needs this information, and why?
> 5. What does the audience already know, and what do they need to know?
> 6. What is the feeling or mood to be?
> 7. What are some of the positive attributes of the current sites as you see
>them? What are some of the negative attributes?
These are probably the right questions, however I think we need to change
the order and put questions 3 & 4 first. If we only want to provide
information to developers, then ordering the links and sections is probably
all we want, and we can forget about the eye candy. On the other hand if we
want to use this site for evangelical needs, then we might need a bit more
design. I don't have to deal much with people questionning my choice of
mod_perl (against MS ASP, Cold Fusion, etc...) so I don't really mind too
much about the evangelical/marketing side, but from my from experience when
one does need to convince a boss or a client, being able to point to a
"good-looking" site helps a lot.
And that influences the answers to questions 1 & 2. Of course, everyone
here will want to support all browsers and all screen sizes. But that is
hardly compatible (within the same HTML page) with a "good-looking" site
(for evangelical/marketing values of good-looking). Hence if we decide to
have a site that works for promotion purposes, a nice design plus a link to
a text-only version would probably be the best choice.
I know that means having two versions of the site, but I guess that a
simple templating system separating the content from the layout would be a
good idea anyway. I think maybe that can be done in mod_perl ;-) (though it
doesn't seem to be running on perl.apache.org, while PHP and JServ are).
Once these questions have been answered, we should come up with easy to
understand top-level sections and subsections, a design that scales well
with information growth and changes, and a simple way to update content.
All in all, it shouldn't be *too* hard if we can leverage our common
experiences.
As a side note, reading about that desert idea this morning triggered a
neuron somehow, so I quickly modified an old template of mine that hadn't
been used and uploaded it at http://www.knowscape.org/modperl/ . It has a
flew flaws (eg: it was made to fit into 800x600) but they can be easily
fixed. No competition here, just a thought. It is anyway too early as yet
to make design decisions. (nb: the eagle and the feather graphics have been
modified and used *without* permission, as has the text from the present
mod_perl page. This is not meant to be a public page.). Also, if you don't
see the link with the desert idea, don't ask me ;-)
I too am glad that this ball is rolling again, I'm sure we can do something
good if we manage to avoid the all-graphics-are-evil-developer vs
why-bother-with-text?-webdesigner flamewars.
.Robin
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
