My current thoughts

[Jason Bainbridge]

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I've just read all the recent posts along with the comments on kde-look and 
the following is a summary of how I feel on the different designs being 
discussed.

Firstly for content sites:

One sided menu on the right:

My personal favourite and the one I believe is ultimately more usable, but am 
getting the feeling that user's are going to be resistant to the change and 
it would become a case of us forcing something more usable onto them.

One sided menu on the left:

'The next best thing', I am willing to support this design given the feedback 
received. The only thing I don't like is the navbar containing the same links 
as on the left, how about just keeping i18n, mirrors and moving the 
International dropdown into this position? I think that would be a good 
solution.

Sebastian would it be possible for you to integrate your one sided menu design 
with the existing PHP for the menu's and breadcrumb menu or alternatively 
make the source available so one of us can do so?

Menu's on both sides:

For content sites I don't think this would be a good idea for reasons 
previously discussed.

Now for the kde.org portal site:

Menu's on both sides (original design:

Too close to the design of the content pages and as others said could easily 
confuse people.

Neil's suggestion:

Would be different enough to differentiate between content sites and the 
portal itself, plus it seems to meet the needs of such a site quite nicely. 
Although I think site of the month plus place for a poll should be integrated 
in the design somewhere. Sebastian, seeing how you seem to be the one with 
the flair for web design would you mind doing up a bit of a prototype in this 
regard as well? :-) (Using Marko's suggestion for the family menu)

Conclusion:

What I'd like to see is http://kde.org being a portal based on Neil's 
suggestion for layout with the addition of the poll and site of the month 
areas. Then the content sites using a one sided menu on the left (to keep the 
general public happy), changing the top navbar to include only i18n, mirrors 
and the International dropdown.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what common menu entries we should have on 
the content sites? Having the whole family of links there is redundant if we 
move to the portal idea, obviously one would be a link to the portal but 
should we have a couple like: About, Develop, Download, News etc. ?

Thoughts?

- -- 
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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