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Date:      Thu, 03 Mar 2005 19:01:47 +0100
From:      "Devon H. O'Dell" <dodell@offmyserver.com>
To:        Murray Stokely <murray@freebsdmall.com>
Cc:        www@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Finally, an implementation of a new FreeBSD.org
Message-ID:  <1109872907.3932.227.camel@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <20050303174802.GB40399@freebsdmall.com>
References:  <1109866064.3932.195.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20050303174802.GB40399@freebsdmall.com>

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cc to www@ since this is of relevance. For a brief history for www@;
I've mailed core@ and Murray about this several times over the past few
years as the topic comes up on advocacy@. We've finally done something
about it, and we're hoping it's received well.

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 09:48 -0800, Murray Stokely wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 05:07:44PM +0100, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> > was brought up (a site for FreeBSD PR). While I do have an
> > implementation of that idea (http://www.sitetronics.com/freebsd.com),
> > his position was that we should first "fix" the current page. I do agree
> > with this (see `FreeBSD.com discussion' below).
> 
> Hi Devon, this is a neat front page for a freebsd.com site.

Thank Chris for it; the implementation and visualization is all his
work. I simply helped with some small details and getting it to
build :).

> > You can see a current build of this repository at http://dragonfly.the-
> > bofh.org/~dodell/en/index.html (I have only built the English version of
> > the website).
> 
> The dark red doesn't really go with the new blue color theme you've
> started using.  I think you should feel free to change the red to
> something else that matches the new cooler colors you chose.  The red
> works well with the warm oranges and yellows in the old site, but it
> seems to clash with the cool shades of blue in the new one.

Which red? The Beastie logo was an old version; a new one has been
uploaded. This is Chris' submission for the new logo. Ideally whatever
we use for the new logo should be placed there.

> The navigation bar at the top is nice, but you should feel free to
> move away from the two vertical boxes on either sides that the current
> site uses.

At the moment, we'd like to work in small steps to keep diffs between
our current repo and www to a minimum. If www@ says that this isn't an
issue, we can certainly work on doing more with the actual presentation
of the content.

Before we want to start messing with potential redesigns of the site,
though, we would probably benefit from taking the next step to moving
the site from a tabular to a <div> based layout.

> We have received a lot of criticism about the left box -- many people
> feel that it is too cluttered, and that the links there could be
> presented in a better way.  There may be too many direct second level
> links.  Should we just link to Documentation, and not to the FAQ and
> Handbook on the main page, for example?  Perhaps the second level
> pages can be reached by a slideout menu with a mouseover.  For
> example, older browsers will just have a 'Documentation' link, but
> newer browsers will display a submenu of FAQ, Handbook, etc.. when you
> mouseover the Documentation link.  Similarly, do we need to list all
> of the different support options on the main page rather than just
> 'Support' with a link to a second level page?

This can be done with pure CSS in most browsers, which makes it very
cool, clean and achievable feature. If we moved most of the left links
into the top menu and moved the right panel over to the left, this would
be doable.

> Some of the information in the right hand box might be better listed
> in the main content area, or maybe it can be moved to the left after
> the number of links in the left box is reduced.

Right!

I think security updates should be moved to the top (or put in a very
visible place); news under that, whatever. But this re-organization is
part of step 2 or step 3.

> As far as the logo, I don't like the use of all capital letters.
> There is also a lot of whitespace above the letters to the level of
> the top of the daemon's horns.  The large tip of his tail that is the
> size of his feet looks out of proportion, even if the goal was to
> introduce perspective.

Well, the logo is obviously something that will need to be figured out
when the contest ends. I prefer my submission and Chris prefers his, so
we'll just leave it for now :)

> And what marketing information would you put on the front page.  Our
> 5+ year old list of 'Based on BSD Unix', 'Cutting edge features',
> etc... may not be the most appropriate, and it's a bit long winded in
> any case.

I'll work on some marketing gunk for possible text replacements soon.

> >         o Restructure the website; using tables for style is
> >           `not good' in the HTML world these days. We would
> >           recreate the page to use <div> tags and CSS for
> >           styling and structure. We would currently like to
> >           keep the site in a tabular format to reduce initial
> >           diffs from www CVS.
> 
> Ok, I think for the front page you should feel free to make larger
> changes.  For the second level pages we would want your patches to be
> easily applied to the includes.sgml file to update everything at once,
> but I don't want you to feel restricted by the existing two vertical
> navigation box design that we've had for so long.

The includes.header.sgml and includes.header.xsl are the only things
that we have modified there.

This is all being done in a private CVS repository, by the way. CVSWeb
is viewable at:

http://dragonfly.the-bofh.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi

I can probably set up anoncvs access. A list of modified and added files
that I can see immediately:

en/freebsd.css
en/index.css
en/index.xsl
en/gifs/freebsd-logo.gif
share/sgml/includes.header.sgml
share/sgml/includes.header.xsl

At the moment, these are the only changes that I know of. Our stance on
leaving the two navigation bars for the moment was that people (and the
page) could get adjusted. If this all should just be done in one time, I
suppose it'd be feasible to just not worry about patchset size. We're
trying to keep it at a minimum for now.

I suppose Chris and I can talk more about what changes we can make to
the front page. I'm up for more radical changes, but we really need to
look at giving it a better structure before we make huge changes,
otherwise the layout will be really difficult to maintain.

> >         o Implement a FreeBSD.com? (I know that Matt Olander has
> >           been talking about this with some members of core, but
> >           more in the line of a FreeBSD PR team. The question
> >           mark is thus present; I don't know if this is desired.)
> 
> Yea this looks great.  We need people to write the whitepapers and
> other second level pages that your current freebsd.com design points
> to.

I think it would be nice to host these on FreeBSD.org as long as we are
free to really place corporate-targetting content. I have several
whitepapers that I can post (things I've written for Offmyserver).
Again, this is something to be worked on later.

> > What is the stance of core@ on this design? Do you feel that it is of a
> > state that we could propose the patch to the www@ guys? Any other
> > suggestions / comments / criticisms?
> 
> I think that you should start showing this work to the www@ guys right
> now.  You should also take a look at other patches that have been
> posted in the past few months.  Other people have changed the colors
> of the boxes and introduced nicer navigation bars as your design does.
> You may get ideas from those patches to incorporate into your design
> before posting it.  Keep up the good work, and take all of the above
> as only one guy's opinion.
> 
>        - Murray

Will do. Www@ guys, what do you think?

Which other patches are available? Are there any links? I'll take a stab
at cleaning up the structure of the site tomorrow and doing the dropdown
boxes.

Since this is pretty public now, let the suggestions come in!

Kind regards, 

Devon H. O'Dell



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