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

[Lester C. <le...@ls...>]

Rustam Gadjimuradov wrote:
> Carlos H. Cantu
>> Seems that you have other talents aside being a good developer ;) I
>> must say that, in general way, your three page "demo" are nice for my
>> eyes. They are clear, with good balance of text/graphics and some good
>> choice of colors and text sizes.
> 
> +1 :)
> 
> However, left menu run to bottom in my IE and i dislike this menu content. :)
> 
>> I really hate some of the terms used in the currently site, and
>> "rabbit roles" is one of them (together with "Under the Firebird
>> Umbrella). I would totally avoid using them in the new site.
> 
> My thoughts too. In current site rabbits is efficient solution,
> but "umbrella" always really deadlocks me. :)
> 
> And about CMS (forgot to wrote in previous letter) - if
> Marius's team already uses some Firebird-support CMS
> (Drupal or what else) - than let them independently choose
> the best they want.

This demo has thrown up a number of things on my 'test environment' and 
highlights one of the problems of static html. I have text overlying boxes on 
some browsers. Not a major problem, but annoying enough, and certainly less 
annoying than some of the static sites I visit! A CMS framework SHOULD already 
handle the different requirements of .css and the like, and is not worth 
discussing here, but manually built pages need to take that into account! (And 
IE6 is not dead - MANY large organizations simply can't afford to replace W2k! )

Another +1 for a proper CMS is the latest news section. This should be built 
automatically FROM the news articles, which is another reason for having a 
central site, rather than referring to other sites for news and other activity. 
And I include the tracker in that ;)

But the main complaint about the 'demo', and one that is not easy to solve, is 
that it barely fills half of the width of my browser so the bulk of the page is 
white space. This is one of my criticisms of the existing site as well, but at 
least that stays to the left of the browser. I know that 'dynamic pages' play 
havoc with some web designers 'esthetic's' but with wide screen monitors at high 
resolution becoming more common ( has anybody tried buying a 1024x768 monitor 
recently ) some consideration should be given to that aspect. Since I do now 
have to use glasses for close work, I switch the browser to 150% text. Try that 
on the demo page ..... and on wiki.firebirdsql.org

A dynamic CMS approach is a lot more than 'complicating things' - it takes care 
of a lot of the 'complicated things' that get forgotten when manually creating 
each page ....

If I get some time over the next couple of days I'll take the demo layout and 
create a theme for it on bitweaver so people can see how it might look, but 
changing the header on the existing wiki site is a 5 minute job, and the top 
menu can be reworked just as easily.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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