Re: [Firebird-website] A few thoughts about (new) site structure,

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

All,

Please let me add my two cents.

This is mostly a reply to the [constructive part of] messages by Carlos 
and Pavel. I'm basically agreed with many things already mentioned here.

I'm also in favor of the KIS principle. Text based, without much 
graphics (maybe except the home page), white background, uniform style 
using firebirdish colors (orange or red), no expandable sub-menus.

The whole site generally consists of three levels: home page, 
sub-sections (to be jumped into via top menu) and documents (to be 
jumped into via a side-bar of a particular sub-section). Deeper level 
documents (if required) should be navigateable directly from the parent 
ones.

I've seen an idea to omit some sections from the top menu (in favor of 
other links?), but I tend to disagree. In this case, sub-sections would 
have no possibility to jump there directly, or it would require 
different top menus for the home page and sub-sections. I'd rather 
prefer to have the same top menu at the every level. But this is surely 
discussable.

There was a good point that we need target on a few areas and use some 
visual "welcome here" approach for the targeted audiences. I think we 
have three categories to handle: newcomers, current users and potential 
sponsors/contributors. So the home page should contain some clearly 
visible special navigation for them. I've codenamed these items "get 
started", "get updated" and "get involved". They should redirect to some 
aggregated pages containing (directly or through the links) the 
information that is of the primary interest of the appropriate audience 
(to save them time iterating through the entire menu system).

Home page may also contain news, but only as shortcut links to the other 
pages with complete articles. The same for the download links.

As a homework, I've created a few sketches (surely amateur) to 
demonstrate the aforementioned ideas:

I'm not sure that IE would show the layout properly, so please use 
Firefox or Opera. Sorry for that, I'm not a web designer ;-)

Level 0 (home page):
http://www.firebirdsql.org/download/rabbits/dimitr/index.html

Level 1 (sub-section):
http://www.firebirdsql.org/download/rabbits/dimitr/dev.html

Level 2 (document):
http://www.firebirdsql.org/download/rabbits/dimitr/roadmap.html

Please don't consider them being a concrete proposal :-) I just hope 
they could be useful as a reference for the further discussion.

I'd also like to suggest pages that could reside in the About section:

   * What is Firebird / Intro
   * Origin / History
   * License
   * Advantages / Key Points
   * SQL compliance
   * Fact Sheets / Success Stories
   * Organization / Sub-Projects


Dmitry