Re: [Firebird-website] A few mockups for firebirdsql.org website

[Dmitry Y. <fir...@ya...>]

All,

I agree with Paul that the "official" orange color is too strong if used 
as the background for large areas, but it should still be very good for 
the logo/title text and probably section captions. One idea that could 
be possibly derived from all the proposed pictures is a combination of 
three colors: orange (see above), 50% gray/blue (other backgrounds, like 
in demos #1 and #2) and white (text area). I'd like to avoid the plain 
gray color we can see at the demo #1. The color scheme #3 is too much 
contrasty (which does attract quick attention but it's IMHO not very 
professional). I'm also not sure about the black areas there (especially 
if the site is going to be center aligned on the screen).

Other thoughts from the top of my head:

  - menu items should be visually separated (e.g. by divider lines)

  - sidebar should also be separated from the text region, either by 
drawings or by color

  - it might look good to isolate sidebar sections also by drawings, 
similar to ingres.com, just placed vertically

  - the expanded menu color should be more different from the underlying 
text color (demo #3 shows a bad example here)

  - I do like the 3D look (mostly area overflows, not shadows) of the 
layout in demo #3, but I'm not going to insist :-)

As a side note, I'm not really sure we need an expandable menu. It was 
considered a cool feature a few years ago, but I think it becomes less 
popular nowadays. Also, a cleverly organized sidebar with quick links to 
most popular pages mostly eliminates the need in such a menu, as it's 
usually not a big problem to go through two pages for rare hyper-jumps.

Just my $0.02 :-)


Dmitry