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

[Rustam G. <fir...@ma...>]

Dmitry Yemanov
> I don't event think it needs voting. I'd rather just leave it up to the 
> web designer doing the "dirty work". The only voting I can think of is 
> to choose from a few predefined sketches to collect the basic view of 
> our preferences

Yes, i think about this way too. But, some of moments - such as 
main color scheme, menu and navigation scheme, site structure
and home page structure+blocks+content - must and can be
"selected" before designers begin to work.

> Feel free to share them! If they're not just about colors and other 
> minor stuff :-)

OK, lets begin, here "too many letters". :)

My thoughts (for clearness i'll state from
"what we should not to do" to "what we can/must do") :

1. No 2-level menus (like mysql.com). I don't dislike
dropdown menus, but if it can be avoided - it must.
Or, compromisse way - hyperlinked dropdownable
menus (such as current "download" and "doc" menus,
but not like current "development" and "licensing").

I think, 5-7 menu items is optimal. My suggestion -
Home - Downloads - Documentation - Development -
News & Events - Support & Community - About.

Top menu bar (and cap as a whole) must be the same
in all site pages. I think, here is nothing to discuss.

For additional navigation sub-pages can have additional
menu bar (under the top) or left menu column - as Carlos
already said, i agree. Also i agree about 3-4 level limitting.

2. No "heavy" and overweighted homepage and main
subsection pages. Not like microsoft.com, oracle.com
and others - good example of bad sites, created by
the whole army of professionals for money.

As starting point, i like Dmitry's offered design of homepage.
"About" text is too bad, "SF Award winner" block is inapproriate
in the home page etc, but all of this - is details, main - blocks 
and structure - is good as for me. What must be instead of
right-top block - I don't know, may be it's better drop it ...
but i think about "subproject-buttons" - Flamerobin etc.
Or, another way: right-top block - last news, right-bottom -
friend-site banners (firebirdnew, ibphoenix etc).

Good example for meditation and comparision - site ubuntu.com.
No design like mozilla.org, please, but opensuse.org is not bad.

3. Now is not a time to discuss or even talk about subsites
(community.firebirdsql.org etc), which Pavel mentioned.

4. Logo. I disagree with Pavel, I think current logo more good,
than bad. And Carlos's poll confirms this. May be it needs some
cosmetical redesign, but it isn't directly related with site redesign.
In any case, I think it's not time to "re-branding".

--

If someone has forgotten last year's design proposals - just
compare them with current proposals. :)