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Date:      Sat, 8 Oct 2005 11:34:42 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        freebsd-www@freebsd.org
Subject:   New website
Message-ID:  <20051008013442.GX72352@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>

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Whilst the new website looks OK on my laptop at 800x600, switching to
my desktop reveals a number of serious shortcomings (as noted by other
people as well).

1) If your browser is not in a window that is roughly 800px wide, you
   either need to scroll horizonally or have whitespace on the edges.
   The old website resized automatically so this is a serious regression.
   Looking at Emily's proposal PNGs that were posted recently, this is
   far more obvious there.
2) The default text size is too small.  As other people have stated,
   if I've gone to the efford of setting up my browser to provide a text
   size that suits me, why should the website over-ride it?  Clicking
   the 'large' text buton gives me back the text size I configured but
   only if I have Javascript and cookies enabled.  The language choices
   also then wrap onto two lines.  Again, this is a regression.
3) Visited links are no longer displayed as visited.  Another regression.

I also think that dedicating about 50% of the home page to news,
events, press releases etc is overkill.  More space should be
allocated explaining what FreeBSD is and why you should read more
about it.  Based on the new front page, I don't see anything that
would make me bother to click through to the "learn more" - the
existing text does not distinguish it from any other *BSD.

The 'Donate' and 'Contact' links at the top need to be better
distinguished from the 'text size' links.  My suggestion would be to
move the 'Donate' and 'Contact' links into the main menu bar (and
get rid of the need for the text size links by not breaking the
text size to start with).

There has been some suggestions that having a smaller home page means
that you don't need to scroll.  Unfortunately, this isn't true unless
you have a very tall screen.  Whilst I can how see most of the headings
in the bottom section of the screen, none of them are links so I still
need to scroll down.  How about converting all these headings to links?

Overall, I'm disappointed at the regressions in the adaptability of
the website - just because lots of other websites state "best viewed
with MSIE at 800x600 resolution" doesn't make it right.  It's a pity
that there appears to have been no effort to provide a trial version
of the new website to get some feedback.

-- 
Peter Jeremy



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