Based on feedback so far, I agree with separating the look/feel work from the content, and also agree with finding a way to do this more incrementally.
Both Adam and Thilo want a better left-nav bar design - so let's discuss. My thought was to move the most frequently accessed things (a guess, true) toward the top, and to shrink the list by eliminating groupings that didn't really seem (to me) to serve a purpose - and in place of this to just put those things that would have been in such a "general" group right at the top level. As part of shrinking the list, also, I moved the "home" to the bottom of the page (on the footer at the left), and also made the UIMA logo at the right into a hotspot that went to "home". I don't feel strongly about all this, but did want to shrink the list where possible (reduce cognitive load on the viewer :-) ). One other thing we could do is to have a hover-activated pop-up for the UIMA logo which said "home". Adam suggests re-adding in a top category, called "General". Do people think this is better than the alternative of just putting the items that would have been in General, at the top level? If we go with Adam's initial suggestion, it is missing a bunch of links, that in the prototype are under the categories of Community, Development, and Events & Conferences - should we just keep those 3 categories as proposed in the prototype? Both Adam and Thilo want the paragraph on what is UIMA moved up to the top. I was trying to balance that with the idea that a first time visitor to the website would want to get an impression - and the impression I wanted to convey was that this Apache project had not just UIMA (frameworks), but also Annotator components, etc. Hence, the picture. I feel that the initial paragraph (in the current site), which says things like "UIMA is a framework..." - to be true, but if at the top, may give the initial impression that that's what this project is all about (instead of also being about Annotators, etc.). Here's a suggestion: have 2 "sections" : one, which would have the title "What is UIMA", and would have the famous paragraph(s) as in the current site, and another, which could have the title "What is the Apache UIMA project about" (please suggest something better :-) ), which would have the new picture, and emphasize that at this site there are multiple things, all related to UIMA, including Anntotators. The next question, if we did that, would be: which one should come first? Or, maybe we could put them side by side ? :-) What do you think users want to know when they first come onto the site? To me, they want to know what's here, and what they can get (i.e., download), at a high level. But maybe that's just me... -Marshall
