Way to success?

[Jason Bainbridge]

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On Sat, 19 Oct 2002 00:09, Sebastian Faubel wrote:
> 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...

I did in Konq + Moz, the two columns of links design squishes the content into 
a miniscule column, where the one column design degrades quite nicely.

> 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.

*I* personally understand the concept and I'm sure most people already 
familiar with KDE would do also, but at the end of the day a lot of people 
aren't going to know the distinction. I think if we adopt the portal idea 
though then we cna lose most of the family links from the content sites 
anyway, just add a few major ones with a link back to the portal.

>
> > 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.

Codebase <> CSS, the CSS is easy enough to fix up but the PHP and it's 
underlying includes is what was focused on. Please feel free to bring the CSS 
up to scratch, as you said it really needs it. :-)

and about MSIE, are enough of our target audience going to be using the non 
standards compliant browser in the first place? I guess though if it can be 
supported better solely by changing the CSS I wouldn't mind but I don't want 
endless checks on the User Agent to render different html for MSIE alone.

> > 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?

What logic? If http://kde.org is to become a portal then it *needs* to have 
it's content moved elsewhere, a portal should not have any content of it's 
own.

>
> > 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.

So where is the problem in my suggestions in that regard?


Regards,
- --
Jason Bainbridge
KDE - Conquer Your Desktop - http://kde.org
KDE Web Team - webmaster at kde.org
KDE Usability Project - http://usability.kde.org
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