Way to success?

[Jason Bainbridge]

Firstly I vote for the one sided menu on the right as per Neil and I's modifications. IMHO it frees up a lot more screen real estate for content and moves the focus to the content itself, then if people wish to navigate elsewhere the menu is in one simplified place for them to navigate.

The work on that prototype has mainly been focused upon the codebase and as Sebastian pointed out the CSS still needs a lot of work. Originally my work begun with using the Sebastian's original design and making the menu's dynamic as per the existing usability.kde.org code, there was no original intention to hack the style.

Neil then also pitched in and cleaned up the existing code quite a lot making it much easier to maintain and adopt for other sites. It was during the process of Neil and I making our changes that we realised two menu's is alright when you know the distinction between the two, but users shouldn't need to know such a distinction to be able to navigate a site.

So we re-designed it with a single menu, which was something I had actually proposed in earlier discussions to see how it would look. The search box was also relocated as when the browser was resized to a smaller size the search box would receive the main focus instead of the content.

As for the CVS re-organisation can we please knock this one on the head and agree that it has been agreed upon already? Although I do like the suggestion of moving all the configuration/images directories into a single parent directory, so lets do that and move forward, eh?

I  have also had thoughts about http://kde.org becoming a portal based site with a different layout to the content sites, with the existing kde.org site becoming a content site itself with something like http://home.kde.org. The portal could contain things like the latest dot news, the latest app's, links to the family of sites, a voting poll and a KDE site of the month area so it would be purely a navigation aid to getting to the content based pages.

Regards,
Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Christoph Cullmann <cullmann at babylon2k.de>
To: kde-www at mail.kde.org
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 22:49:59 +0200 
Subject: Re: Way to success?

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Hi,
now that Sebastian has shown his opinion (which is right in many way, 
especially that nobody seems to have seen any need in informing him about the 
newdesign testing stuff), here would come my proposal:

1. Restart in Design voting, please simply vote on this list which design now 
should make it to get a final conclusion on at least that topic !
  To vote for I set atm three design:
     1) Sebastian's 2 sided menu design, which is successfull on kde-look and 
         by many kde users / devs
     2) Sebastian's (personally disliked) 1 sided menu
     3) Neil + Jaseone's modified version of Sebastians design (1 side menu on 
         the right)

2. Write up a design draft with the common sense stuff for the 
directory/include structure on kde.org, which may include the following 
common sense stuff on which the most people can agree:

www/inc - system wide includes
www/images - system wide images (needed for the in www/inc used design, ...)
www/styles - system wide style sheets
(maybe we can group that dirs in one "media" dir or so, to make it clear that 
this dirs need to be on each server in sync)

www/areas/* - areas/locations/... whatever called kde homepages (for example 
kde.org as home, usability, development, multimedia, ...) (That differs from 
what you wanted in your design manual Sebastian, but not much, as your 
toplevel dirs (development, ....) are just moved one step deeper in tree 
hierarchy)

www/apps/* - for the application homepages of the kde apps

www/i18n/"isocode" - the internationalisated pages (like kde.de and more ;)

The different maintainers will get acl's for their dirs (like Sebastian 
proposed in his paper and like it is atm, too)

The menu will be generated via a menu.inc in the current dir of the app, 
support of hierachical menus can be done as atm in newdesign, quiet nice, 
IMHO

Attached is Sebastian's design memo (as html, not that nice, sorry, had no 
startoffice, physos converted it in on of the last irc meetings), it doesn't 
fit 100% to what we have agreed on in irc, I only want to show what Sebastian 
first thoughts were. (The most important stuff is nearly in sync with our 
thought, only some dirnames differ (for example we have a subdir areas for 
the multimedia/usability/... stuff), but that should not be that bad, or ?)

Should I set up a design paper on kde.org/new-design.html ? (just to view it 
online for all ?)

cu
Christoph

- -- 
Christoph Cullmann
Kate/KDE developer
cullmann at kde.org
http://kate.kde.org
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