On 10.09.2008, at 08:20, Andreas Demmer wrote:
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
* The text links at the bottom (Get Software ... Wiki ... Build Service) should be up top rather than at the bottom.
We decided to put them to the lower bottom from an aesthetic point of view. IMHO it is a learned habit that if the meta-navigation is not on the upper right side, it can be found in the page footer.
I also see it as a unwritten rule. Specially the main topic of this page is transparency and overview. This means: 1. Make it easy for newbies and newcomers to: 1.1 find out what openSUSE is (Text unter the sticker-graphic) 1.2 dig into the openSUSE.org univers (3 Boxes: Get it, Discover it, Creatie it) 2. Make searching the openSUSE-pages easy (Search-box) 3. Get informations about current or upcoming events, etc. (the wide column in the second half) 4. Provide some news, to display, that we are a active community (News at the top of the slim column) 5. Provide help (the "life belt" get enough attention if you are looking for Help! Also slim column) 6. Promote the openSUSE merchandising shop About #5:
I'd like to see "Help & Support" moved up above "News & Events", just to make it as quick and easy as possible to find it.
Our users need no help, 'cause everything works perfect in openSUSE, the Help thing is just symbolic ;-) No, seriously: I think it's at the perfect position there. Who is looking for help will find it very easily and moving it above the News would send the message "More people are interested in Help then in New and the Community". And I'm absolutely against this message! So Andreas wrote:
This should be very easy to do. @Robert: Do you agree?
I do not agree. We could display just 3 News to bring the Help-section closer to the top.
* It's necessary to scroll to get to a lot of the content. I don't think this is entirely avoidable, but maybe it'd be possible to minimize this?
Whitespace is good! We did not want to fill every available space which would make the pake look rather packed. Now, it has a certain ease to it.
IMHO vertical scrolling is very common for web pages and as long as you do not need to scroll for ages to reach the relevant parts of a website, that's fine. We tried to put the most common tasks on top (get, discover, build) while most users will have their deeplinks for the other pages.
Agree. There is a study about user-behavior on webpages, which discovered, that more then 80% of the tested people did not actively notice that they scrolled on a webpage. And as Andreas already mentioned ... the importend stuff is at the top and the rest is for visitors wich are more interested or look for something special. And the scrolling distance is nearly nothing.
I'm not a designer, but I'm wondering if it might make better use of space to include the search bar in the grey box on the page?
Robert loves his searchbar! :-) The seperation and position gives the page an organic feeling to it. We scribbled other suggestions but were not too pleased with the results.
The searchbar is perfect at these position! With out it, the page is just an other boring standard webpage with out any flavor. It's a necessary part of the screen-design.
* To increase accessibility to page and basically send out a "We care" message, Andreas will add an option to switch to high-contrast view.
+1 This idea is brilliant!
I would change is to make the 'openSUSE' text in the button sticker image completely legible. The 'openSUSE' name is a brand I guess and the fancy bend/twist of the image shouldn't affect any part of the text or chameleon logo (right now the trailing 'SE' letters are not perfectly clear/visible).
Robert and me discussed over this a lot where I took your argumentation. But we saw very quickly that the button looked oddly faked when we removed the reflections over the letters only (and the perspective distortion).
The Logo is fully recognisable and all characters are still readable. It a great eye-candy, which makes the page cool and I don't see a problem here. Whit out tweaking the "SE" and the reflections it would look like a cheep fake made by an amateur.
A possible bug: http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/os_flag.png See http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=english+flag
Ok, insistance is the path to success: In the next update, I will use the union-jack as flag for the English language. :-)
Thank you! :-)
Well I'm not sure that using flags at all is a good idea. The w3c recommends against it[0], see their reasoning.
I see your point, but it's a perfekt hook for people who Skimm & Scann the page ... what the most users on webpages do.
t is not about design, but content :) +1
Form follows function but design provides guidance.
Aye, fully agree!
If it is possible to still use the old design, I would suggest to:
Sorry, but this is likely not an option. 50+ people agreed that the new frontpage is far better than the old one (despites the suggestions), only 2 countervotes so far. :-)
+1
The help & support section excludes irc and documentation. Don't know if that's deliberate, but I think those are important - maybe it should just be a link to help.opensuse.org
Good suggestion!
+1 Good point.
I think the search bar positioning in relation to the rest of the content is a little bit "avant garde" and unusual, but it's part of what makes the page so cool. I definitely vote to keep it as is.
+1000 :-D
+1000! That's exactly the idea behind it :-D
Overall, I'm greatly impressed with this design. Andreas and Robert - looks great!
Thank you! :-)
Thanx! :) Cheers, Robert --- Robert Lihm, Webdesigner - Build Service Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, D-90409 Nuernberg Tel: +49-911-74053-0 - rlihm@suse.de ____________________________________________________________ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ____________________________________________________________ SUSE - a Novell business -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org