maintainer of www.kde.org?

[Kurt Granroth]

On Sunday 20 October 2002 12:23 pm, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> As far as I know Kurt Granroth is essentially the author/maintainer of
> the current www.kde.org site.  I'm not sure where he is in all of
> this, so I dropped him a note.

I have followed this topic in the sense of reading every 30 or 40th message.  
I do have a few thoughts on the topic, though.

On The Look & Feel
------------------
Visually, pretty much all of the new proposals "look" good.  Much better 
than what I came up with with the current one.  I'll admit that I get more 
than a few pangs of "you're replacing my baby!"... but it's clear that the 
current batch of designers have a better graphical touch than I ever had.

I am concerned that the visual aspects of the site are over-riding the 
usability aspects.  I tried to make navigation from the main www.kde.org 
page as obvious as possible.  Some of these new proposals have a huge 
amount of possible jumping off points.  Lots and lots of links can be 
extremely confusing for peole just trying to get beginning information 
about KDE.

There seems to be three main schools of thought on navigation: nav bar on 
right, on left, and on both left and right.  Of the three, only the "nav 
bar on the right" is a bad idea.  There is no precedence for having 
navigation links on the right side of a web page (and ample precedence for 
the opposite).  I fear that putting a bar on the right would be an attempt 
to be different just for the sake of being different.  That is the the 
absolute worst reason to do anything from a usability pov.

The "two bars" look can work as long as the bars have very clearly 
differentiated links AND it's obvious at a glance that they are different.  
If there is any commonality between the two, then navigation becomes 
unnecessarily confusing.  I still tend to shy away from two bar navigation 
mostly because it requires a decently large screen... but who uses a screen 
less than 1024 anymore, anyway.

I tend to favor the "one bar on left" look mostly because:
a) It's a very standard look... MOST major info websites use this structure
b) It doesn't require very large screens
c) It simplifies navigation

On Making the Decision
----------------------
There is a poll on kde-look and some people have made noise that this 
somehow matters.  It doesn't.  KDE isn't, never was, and never will be a 
democracy.  What is needed is one focal "maintainer" who is willing to 
synthesize the all incoming input while creating the site AND is willing to 
keep the site up to date afterwords.  During the creation of the current 
incarnation, I was a bit of a dictator... and it worked.  If I had allowed 
just any input, then the site would never had been completed.  At some 
point, you have to say "enough" and go with what you have.

The problem here is that there really doesn't seem to be any one CLEAR 
leader.  In the old case, I was the clear lead just because I started it 
and I was the most obnoxious if anybody disagreed.