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List: kde-www
Subject: Re: maintainer of www.kde.org?
From: Kurt Granroth <granroth () kde ! org>
Date: 2002-10-21 2:09:29
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On Sunday 20 October 2002 12:23 pm, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> As far as I know Kurt Granroth is essentially the author/maintainer of
> the current www.kde.org site. I'm not sure where he is in all of
> this, so I dropped him a note.
I have followed this topic in the sense of reading every 30 or 40th message.
I do have a few thoughts on the topic, though.
On The Look & Feel
------------------
Visually, pretty much all of the new proposals "look" good. Much better
than what I came up with with the current one. I'll admit that I get more
than a few pangs of "you're replacing my baby!"... but it's clear that the
current batch of designers have a better graphical touch than I ever had.
I am concerned that the visual aspects of the site are over-riding the
usability aspects. I tried to make navigation from the main www.kde.org
page as obvious as possible. Some of these new proposals have a huge
amount of possible jumping off points. Lots and lots of links can be
extremely confusing for peole just trying to get beginning information
about KDE.
There seems to be three main schools of thought on navigation: nav bar on
right, on left, and on both left and right. Of the three, only the "nav
bar on the right" is a bad idea. There is no precedence for having
navigation links on the right side of a web page (and ample precedence for
the opposite). I fear that putting a bar on the right would be an attempt
to be different just for the sake of being different. That is the the
absolute worst reason to do anything from a usability pov.
The "two bars" look can work as long as the bars have very clearly
differentiated links AND it's obvious at a glance that they are different.
If there is any commonality between the two, then navigation becomes
unnecessarily confusing. I still tend to shy away from two bar navigation
mostly because it requires a decently large screen... but who uses a screen
less than 1024 anymore, anyway.
I tend to favor the "one bar on left" look mostly because:
a) It's a very standard look... MOST major info websites use this structure
b) It doesn't require very large screens
c) It simplifies navigation
On Making the Decision
----------------------
There is a poll on kde-look and some people have made noise that this
somehow matters. It doesn't. KDE isn't, never was, and never will be a
democracy. What is needed is one focal "maintainer" who is willing to
synthesize the all incoming input while creating the site AND is willing to
keep the site up to date afterwords. During the creation of the current
incarnation, I was a bit of a dictator... and it worked. If I had allowed
just any input, then the site would never had been completed. At some
point, you have to say "enough" and go with what you have.
The problem here is that there really doesn't seem to be any one CLEAR
leader. In the old case, I was the clear lead just because I started it
and I was the most obnoxious if anybody disagreed.
From what I read, Cris Cullmann seems to be a reasonable fellow and has done
nice work on the "testing" page. As long as the final design incorported
the obviously good other idea presented, I would have no problems with him
heading up the maintainer team.
On the Name
-----------
I'm going to bring this up with no delusions that anything will happen. Way
back when we were redesigning kde.org, I solicted a proposal that we remove
references to "K Desktop Environment" from the website and only use KDE.
That's because it doesn't matter what KDE stands for anymore. "Desktop
Environment" means absolutely NOTHING to anybody but old CDE users. Just
like the K now means nothing, KDE should also mean nothing. I was able,
back then, to convince enough people to go ahead with it. Unfortunately, I
was never a good enough artist to design a replacement logo and could never
find the time to get an artist to do it.
I mention this because now would be a good time to try it again. With a new
website, we could just start dropping all references to the "desktop
environment" and everybody would be the happier.
Good luck!
--
Kurt Granroth - "KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop"
KDE Developer/Evangelist | granroth@kde.org
http://www.granroth.org | kurt@granroth.org
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