Subject: Re: Web Site Redesign
From: Alan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 12:45:59 CDT
Summary: The redisign is sweet, keep up the good work
if you can think of anything to make it easier to maintain that would be
even better.
Perhaps there should be a webteam? team >= 2, so that one person does not
get stuck with too much.
For example, the current front page has two links to the FAQ and Dowloads,
it would be great if we could centralise the dowloads, perhaps using a
shared include file or other restructuring.
There seems to be various devloper pages, i would like for there to be one
definative startpage for developers, preferably at abisource.com/developer/
with developer.html, and developer.phtml, etc being redirects to same so as
not to break old links.
If possible any internal pages that you move or remove should be replaced
with a redirect to an appropriate page or the relevant 40X Error code.
Google is our friend, breaking old links is really really bad (just ask
Philip Greenspun, checkout photo.net its a really simple but well designed
site).
It would be really cool if the 404 Not Found page was customised, perhaps a
picture of that freindly cartoony vermin everyone else seems to like and a
copy of the Navbar (shared.inc) or some sort of sitemap, so that the 404 is
actually useful. (and maybe a google search box with "site:abisource.com"
already filled in)
id _really_ _really_ like for the site to keep the Big Blue "A" (from the
official SourceGear artwork, assuming they have no objections).
> One comment -- I'm concerned about overselling AbiWord, and thus the
> words "similar to Microsoft® Word" in the following:
How about not mentioning the evil Empire at All
and using this text
> AbiSource is developing seamlessly cross-platform, Open Source desktop applications. The first is the AbiWord word processor, currently
> available for free on Windows, Unix, GNOME, BeOS and QNX. We invite you to try it for yourself.
>
If it sounds shockingly familiar that's because it is (direct from the
current home page). Id like to think a lot of thought went into it the
first time, and theres no harm in keeping it.
> However, the download section is a little convoluted.
> Our current site has a LOT of redundancy here. My goals for the
> download section were to reduce this repetition and make the page
> a little more dynamic in terms of detecting the right set of
> downloads to display
>
And of course a way to bypass the autodetection (or a good default fallback)
but from your past work i bet you've already thought of that. i often
download stuff for other platforms while using windows because that is what
is available in Unversity where i have much more bandwidth than at home.
> Fixed description of Vi/Emacs bindings howto from old “F12" command to config file.
>
Isnt that a bug? But for the sake of simple people like me id go crazy if
abiword suddenly started using all sorts of "unusual" keybindings and having
to figure out what happended, and i suppose vi & emacs users are used to
editing config files. Many people (naive users) have trouble figuring out
Insert/Overwrite, although most people learn pretty fast.
Best to leave it out unless it is clearly marked and does not threaten our
target archetypal "Church Secretary".
Hmm im getting a messed up copy of the download page again,
http://abiword.aiksaurus.com/download/ im using Netscape, this time on
windows last time it was on FreeBSD.
For older versions of Netscape 4.x it is really important to specify img
height and width and it already available from the existing php scripts.
This allows Netscape 4.x to render the page faster, particularly on a page
with lots of tables.
Single tags like <img> <hr> or <meta> can be replaced with <img /> <hr />
and <meta />
So long as you put in a space before the closing / older browsers will
interpret it as an unknown parameter but not choke on it. (i went through
shared.inc changing all these and converting all TAGS to lowercase).
I really like the design and i hope to see it on Abisource.com soon (after
some testing of course). I only criticise because i care :P
Later
Alan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Sep 27 2001 - 12:49:07 CDT