Re: [Firebird-website] [Firebird-general] Re: Fb Website

[Pavel C. <pc...@ib...>]

Giovanni Premuda napsal(a):
> 
> But in the last 10 years, any sugestion, offer, or actual contribution 
> has been grounded by attacks and resistance to change.

You greatly exaggerate. The Firebird website was completely redesigned
several times over last 10 years. All redesigns were made by Helen and
me, based on changing project's needs and feedback from anybody who
cared to express opinion. We heard countless *suggestions*, very few
offers and saw almost zero real contributions (most of those were just
images and other graphics). We've got no improved CSS, no content
(except content created as part of our sub-projects), nothing, zero, nada.

Yes, we're not professional web designers. We did our best, but we know
it's not enough. I can handle the background code just fine and Helen
can provide great content, but neither of us is HTML/CSS/Graphics
wizard. However, any time we asked for help with that, we've got just
talk (except Marius' contribution which is first *real* contribution to
make appealing website we've ever got), especially how we should do it
in this or that CMS. That's one hell of disappointment. Instead getting
help in what we need, we are constantly offered opinions and advices
about things that we don't need. I don't want to hear that I should
spend hours of my time to learn Drupal or whatever CMS so I could code
another non-appealing website. Give me appealing CSS that looks great in
all browsers that we could use instead such advices, and we could
implement it right away. Did we get any? Nope, just the same old "use
this, use that technology" b****. I understand that it's mostly because
we're all developers, so all help/advice is developer-related, but
anyway, we're getting tired of this over all years it's thrown at us.

> Want to talk about changing the layout?
> Talk is cheap, do not disturb the ones doing things.

We know what we want, we're just not skilled enough in design neither we
have enough time to learn it as we have other more important duties. If
you want to help us, help us with THAT. We don't need help with code,
administration and all developer/administrator-related stuff.

> You actually do something?
> You should have talked about it before.

If you put cart before the horse, then certainly. Ask what we want to
achieve and then you can create and offer us a design that could be
accepted. But don't throw at us any design you saw, liked and copied,
and that may work for someone else but not for us.

> Some years ago I even paid a graphic designer to produce some layouts, 
> but before she was finished someone else proposed some reasonably good 
> layouts and was attacked so badly that I decided to avoid the same fate.

Too bad you wasted your money, you should rather submit the design. Even
better would be if you would collect the reasons why the previous one
was "attacked so badly" so you would come with one that would be accepted.

> DB driven sites make change to the structure of the site quite painless.
> And 99% of the professional sites around the world are db driven. It 
> can't be that bad.  BTW it's really not the message an open source DBMS 
> should give, unless we want people to believe that MySQL is stabler than 
> Firebird.

Yes, no, maybe. But underlying technology doesn't make an appealing
website, design does. So, could we let it go and concentrate on design?
Let the *real* requirements to dictate the technology once we'll get
there, please?

best regards
Pavel Cisar