Re: website facelift

Hello there! As (up to this point) the de-facto graphic designer of the
AbiWord clan, I feel compelled to reply. :)

I like most of the simplification concepts when it comes to the content
- I would agree that the current web site is a little difficult to
navigate and find what you want. There are a couple of suggestions that
I have about that aspect, however. The current web site has a large box
on the front page with the current version number and a download link.
While your mockup includes a download link, there is no instant way to
tell on the front page what the latest version is. This is a great
feature on a web site, IMHO, and not enough software websites utilize
it, considering that much traffic to such a site is likely to be
existing users looking to see if updates are available.

The basic layout, as well, appeals to me (as does the nice Tour page),
but I have a few concerns there as well. Even though the site does not
use frames and you're using CSS magic to fix the sidebar there, as you
may be able to guess from the thread thus far, the bad experiences users
have had with frames may lead them to mistrust the web site. Potential
problems with platform compatibility concern me as well, though I
haven't had a chance to verify them for myself. (Yes, the Windows
maintainer runs Linux a lot of the time, scandalous!) I also have a
small concern with using a web site layout from an external source,
because at the moment, it looks more like the web site content and ideas
(which are, on the whole, great) are being shoehorned into a design
which doesn't fit. Take, for instance, how much smaller our brand
(AbiWord) and slogan/tagline (and description of product: word
processing for everyone), are compared to, say, the sidebar links, or
the main heading, "Welcome", on the homepage. The colors and other
design elements also don't match any current AbiWord assets, but that
might be partially because they're mostly on my hard drive :). I'd be
more than willing to work with your content and my design elements in a
new web site for AbiWord.

As you may have sensed, I'm in favor of a strong brand for AbiWord, and
a consistent look. When I originally ended up being in charge of the
(not recently updated) GNOME Office web site ( www.gnomeoffice.org ), I
created a design that I intended to be useable across all member project
web sites, to unify the suite. This effort has only been partially
successful, due to several factors (me losing my gnome-cvs ssh key,
inadequate communication between me and the Gnumeric project and a lack
of communication entirely between me and the gnome-db project, mostly
due to a lack of time). Regardless, my web site framework does exist
and actually work well, as proven by the fact that I used it to create
the Divifund web site for the program by Martin Sevior and contributions
by me ( www.divifund.com ). It is based on SSI, uses one page per
directory (for forward-compatibility reasons, in case the site changes
and the pages are now PHP or something else entirely, bookmarks remain
valid), and also validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. It likewise
degrades gracefully when styles are turned off, and lists of links
(menus) are actually lists. (I'll have you know that was not the
simplest to get working :D ).

I just now realized exactly how long this email is, so I do believe I'll
wrap it up here. I like a lot of your ideas, and your content is
great. Some of the actual design elements and web site structure
elements I personally do not favor in their present state, but I'm
willing to work with you on combining our designs.

Thanks for your contributions! (your bug reports, too :D)

Ryan

Kiddo wrote:

>Hello,
>I have a website prototype running for those interested... sorry if I
>might offend anyone with its "simplify everything" approach :). Maybe
>you've never heard of me before, I just got around here and thought
>that the website could benefit a little love.
>
>http://open-source.nanokron.info/projets/abiword/
>
>I just hacked that together last night. The support and participate
>sections are not done, since I wanted to ask for feedback before
>diving into that, as I plan to merge+simplfy things again (you might
>have noticed I did my best to kill "small" pages and create unique,
>solid sections, in a perspective to confuse the newbie user less).
>
>Regards
>Jeff Fortin ~ aka nekohayo on bugzilla and IRC
>
>
>

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
AbiWord Win32 Platform Maintainer
www.abisource.com
"Optimism is the father that leads to achievement." - Helen Keller