On 02/26/2015 08:50 AM, Carnë Draug wrote:
On 26 February 2015 at 08:32, Richard Crozier<address@hidden> wrote:
On 21/02/15 15:11, Carnë Draug wrote:
On 21 February 2015 at 13:45, Ben Abbott<address@hidden> wrote:
On Feb 20, 2015, at 22:27, Mike Miller<address@hidden> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 12:57:25 -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
wrote:
The web site is actually a CVS repo:
But even in a desktop, I don't really think the new design is better
than the current one. What problem exactly is the new design trying
to solve?
Marketing? Not a problem if you don't care if anyone uses Octave I
suppose.
The new website makes it look like the project is well supported,
including
by a wider community than just the core developers working on the
code. This
gives confidence to new users in the viability and continuation of the
project, for which the website is the first point of contact with the
project.
It is an unfortunate fact of the world that if you care about people
using
your software you have to make pretty pictures and stuff to advertise
it. It
gives the 'feel' of a project that's not just going to disappear to new
users, particularly enterprise, if this is a market you are
interested in.
Unfortunately it's just not enough for the product itself to be great.
The newer website looks amazing and was clearly produced by someone who
knows how to make a great (and professional) looking site. I for one
think
use should be made of the fantastic effort, rather than throw it in
the bin
and discourage anyone else with the relevant skills bothering to help
in the
future?
I guess you missunderstood my question. My question was not why do we
need
a fancy and professional looking website. My question was what on the
current website is the problem? What design choices are we talking about?
Because I don't really see the new one as looking better than the other.
Compare the support [1, 2] and get involved pages [3, 4]? The new one
has
a top bar instead of a side bar, much bigger fonts, and a blue top
instead
of white. Which of these make it look more professional? I just don't
see it.
So on my question "What problem exactly is the new design trying to
solve?"
please be more objective. The new proposed website has a textwidth
that I
feel is too wide and makes it hard to read (I have a 23' screen with
resolution 1920x1080). The old one did not had this problem. The
text lines
are also fixed and do not adjust with the window size (like wikipedia
does
for example).
Also, the new website has this blue background with square lines, with
the
text on a white canvas. Scrolling moves the canvas but not the
background.
Because of this scrolling then becomes weird near the top and the
bottom of
the page because you are not really scrolling the page. It's
unconfortable
the feeling that the page itself is reshaping.
I know design is a lot of personal opinion and taste but you need to be
able to point the problems to improve. "Make it look more professional"
is not good, what is wrong with the current one that causes it to not
look
professional? And does the new website addresses this problems?
I guess I'm with Carnë on this one. The look of the proposed new
website is fine, but it isn't drastically better than the current
website, which I'm OK with. That's not to discourage a new design,
especially if that design is more maintainable because of some webpage
layout software that makes it easy. (I know little about how webpages
are done these days.) However, I think it is a bit too near V4.0 to
move to a whole new design, especially when V4.0 itself is still taking
shape.
For my taste, the proposed website has one or two nice elements, say the
CAD-like blue background, but the fonts are too big and the main page is
too minimalist. I don't know where this trend started (maybe it ushered
in with the iPod/handheld wave) but Fedora's webpage moved to this
minimalist approach where all one sees is a bunch of feel-good photos.
Where years ago it used to be screenshots, lists of software packages,
discussions, road map, and so on, now Fedora's webpage is just a few
sales slogans and "Download Now" buttons. Perhaps developers went that
direction because of how often they update version numbers these days,
don't know. The Gnome 3 environment falls in the same category.
Presenting an overload of info is always a danger, but so is presenting
too little.
That said, there could be plenty of work on the webpage for V4.0 because
the webpage doesn't quite convey where V4.0 is headed. Three things I'd
like to see are
1) Actual Downloading
2) List/table of supported platforms (could be combined with download
buttons) along with screentshots and possibly version number of the most
stable version.
3) A description of the graphics toolkits options
Downloading: The issue with the current "Download" page is that there
isn't anything there that actually downloads the software. It merely
tells one where to go look for the software. That's fine for me, but
probably not for a new user. It would be nice if the link for, say,
SuSE actually brought up the SuSE installation application with the
correct RPM. I'm sure it is a lot of effort to maintain a Download
page--for example, how is installation going to be dealt with on a
system vs. user basis? Maybe have one button for SuSE System and one
button for SuSE User?
List of Supported Platforms: It seems one of the big 4.0
accomplishments is compiling on different platforms. There are
different hardware platforms, and different OS platforms upon those
hardware platforms from the discussions I've seen. Mac OS X, Mac Lion,
Cygwin, WinGW, wasn't there someone who compiled Octave for an App or
something? If someone using each of the platforms updated the download
link and screenshots on occasion, that's adequate. As another category,
include some screenshots of the legacy CLI version of the software (just
linux, and that's already present on the main page of the current
webpage). Why version number per platform? Because I think there
really is some utility to branching per platform if that branch is kept
away from stable/development.
Graphics Toolkits: Just as with the platforms, it would be nice to
convey info about the options with FLTK, gnuplot and Qt packages. Some
screenshots on Linux would do along with a description of the benefit of
each (e.g., the gnuplot package gives appealing graphics output). I
think this is very beneficial to those who don't know what the options
are and to those who want to utilize what they have in the past.
In other words, I like a webpage to provide a little guided tour of the
software and know what my options are before I go through the effort of
installing or choosing a machine on which to install.
Dan