Way to success?

[Sebastian Faubel]

> IMHO it frees up a lot more screen real estate for content and moves the focus to the content itself,

This is not 100% correct. It may be that it frees up space for content,
so there's no way around for having an alternative template for pages
with space consuming content, but it only does if it's programmed well.
Take your browser and resize it with my version and yours... 

> then if people wish to navigate elsewhere the menu is in one simplified place for them to navigate.

Perhaps you missed the idea of my navigation concept. The right panel
does not contain any parts of the internal or main navigation - it's the
related links that you have on a place where you don't have to scroll
down five times your monitor. For me it's really important to see what's
related to the current content, because normally people have interests
beyound the current page... Regarding common known user behaviour, you
should also know that placing the main navigation on the right hand side
is not pretty semantic.

> 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.

Cleaned? Easier to adopt by other pages? With that CSS? This is
definitly the most unlogical and unflexible source code I've ever seen.
There's so much waste in it - I could throw out more than two third and
it still would be looking the same and be more browser compatible. Just
try to watch it in Konqueror and Mozilla resizing - hey and don't ask
about Internet Explorer... Is this the way a portal site should be???
Have a look at the screenshots i attached and see yourself - better
usability? don't make me laugh. 

> 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.

This is not the case...just look a the postings at kde-look. They like
it, that's why it got the highest rating of all (voting not less than
1000 users)! Additionally, could you imagine kde-look with a single
menu, do you really think our "aimed" users are that stupid and don't
get the distinction? Next thing to mention:
Think of a user who has visited the kde.org before, what will he think
when he searches for the navigation on the right? Letting the main
navigation "as it is" or slightly modified will definitly have a
"positive" effect. He will get the distinction of the right panel very,
very soon....... 
 
> 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.

There are several reasons why i put the search box there. Firstly
because you don't have to search for the search box anymore. Second
because it's being associated with the content ( -> Search -> Content ),
or are you searching the navigation? This is normally called sitemap.
Looking at the shapes in the cornor of the search box, will "guide" the
eye to the content very soon.

> I  have also had thoughts about http://kde.org becoming a portal based site with a different
yes, that's what the new design does.

> layout to the content sites, with the existing kde.org site becoming a content site itself 
> with something like http://home.kde.org.
no, or do you really want to argue your users? 
Do you think they will get the logic?

> 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.

That's what the kde.org homepage should be, really.

greetings,

sebastian