Status update ?

[Jason Bainbridge]

-----Original Message-----
From: Christoph Cullmann <cullmann at babylon2k.de>
> Well, where is the list of requirements that you, >Rainer, and Jason were to
> produce?
>As nobody has written it: nowhere.

I have been quite willing and able to write the requirements based on prior discussions but as nobody has shown any interest in following the requirements I have been concentrating on preparing my paper for Linux.conf.au instead.

>But would help that requirements to get a decision ? 

How can you make a decision when you don't have any authorative word on what people want the new design to contain? It's almost like buying a new car based on looks alone, of course everyone would want the sports car but for a large family is it the right choice?

>We have only 4 designs to choose from, why waste time >with writting documents 
>over documents to choose between 4 things ? As choosing >the design is a very 
>subjective thing (in the end), writing a style guide >for one design would be 
>a bit overkill or ?

But it wouldn't be writing a style guide for a single site it would be documenting what people would want a new design of kde.org to contain. All we are currently doing is hacking an existing design to try to meet people's wishes we aren't implementing a new design based around people's wishes.

>... Could now be some decision made up ? If you don't >want to participate in 
>that process, let it be, but don't delay that now again >and again.

If voting is going to decide which design gets chosen than the major KDE mailing lists should be involved in the process, after all they are our own main users.

>On my side: I vote for the modified-2 version or the >original of root66, the 
>two fit nice in my eyes (like the hideable bar in >mod-2). 

A hidable menu seems to me like it would make the user think that it is something that even we see as being redundant, which would seem to indicate a design flaw. If we really are going to do something like that it should be something like DHTML where it's one of those floating side tab things that slide in when hovered over.

If we are being forced to vote without following any process than my vote rests with http://usability.kde.org/newdesign/ , which now has an option to see what the menu looks like on the left. It is only available for the front page as I think it would be silly to offer the user an option like moving the orientation of the navigation menu, this would be something defined by the site maintainer and applicable across their whole site.

Regards,
Jason