2010/11/24 Vinzenz Vietzke <vinz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Agreed on the rushing, that's definitely an issue. However I'm not sure a compressed footer is the best thing to do, since that means we've got two different ones and it'll be even harder to get them consistent across all websites. Also, most of the links in your mockup footer are also in the header on www.fpo. If we only want to have those, we could also use the existing menu bar somewhere, as in [1].
I tried to get the search functionality front and center, without removing the footer in [2]. We can easily make the footer stick to the bottom of the screen, so it gets out of the way but is still there if you need it. By putting the search bar right in the middle of the screen, it's still the most prominent object on the page.
Another option is to hide the footer a bit. I tried making that div's position absolute and putting the top at 90%. Doing this, only the very top part is visible on your screen and the rest when you scroll down. I'm not sure that's a good option though, it looks quite strange, as if something went wrong.
Actually there's already a page that has most of that, the Community page on www.fpo. We designed that just as you describe, as a kind of hub for community information.
Thus, I think it's best to keep all of that on the Community page, and remove the feeds from start.fpo again. It really adds too much noise IMO.
Anyway, I'll give it some more thought next week.
As for the Google topic, those are all valid points but it's probably something to discuss on a different list. For now, I think the content is good enough: everybody is familiar with Google, and the CC filters add a nice touch that for instance Firefox's search bar doesn't provide. I just want to give start.fpo a quick facelift. :)
Jef
[1] http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/temp/menubar.png
[2] http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/temp/start1.png
I think using the same footer on "regular" websites like www.fpo or
get.fpo is absolutely necessary. But on such a special site like
start.fpo I think it would be better not to "rush" the user with
content. Especially new users would just get struck by all this
information and would overlook the search bar as core functionality.
Maybe we should talk about two different sites:
* welcome.fedoraproject.org
Think of it looking like my v3 with a "compressed" standard footer. [1]
This site should only contain the searching functionality since it's
intended as browser home page.
Agreed on the rushing, that's definitely an issue. However I'm not sure a compressed footer is the best thing to do, since that means we've got two different ones and it'll be even harder to get them consistent across all websites. Also, most of the links in your mockup footer are also in the header on www.fpo. If we only want to have those, we could also use the existing menu bar somewhere, as in [1].
I tried to get the search functionality front and center, without removing the footer in [2]. We can easily make the footer stick to the bottom of the screen, so it gets out of the way but is still there if you need it. By putting the search bar right in the middle of the screen, it's still the most prominent object on the page.
Another option is to hide the footer a bit. I tried making that div's position absolute and putting the top at 90%. Doing this, only the very top part is visible on your screen and the rest when you scroll down. I'm not sure that's a good option though, it looks quite strange, as if something went wrong.
The only additional function I'd add would be a link named "switch to
daily start page" or so, which updates the browser home page to a
start.fedoraproject.org variant as stated below.
* start.fedoraproject.org
On this site I'd place things like RSS feeds, tweets, rotating photo
galleries etc. Something like a portal but only with aggregated content
so no daily maintenance would be needed.
Perhaps pushing planet.fpo unfiltered to this site should be rethought
since there are sometimes quite useless postings like "i have voted" or
so. Maybe someone should pick the 20-30 most "valuable" ones and tell
the blog owners about the fact that their posts will appear on
start.fpo. In this way a little quality assurance would be given.
Actually there's already a page that has most of that, the Community page on www.fpo. We designed that just as you describe, as a kind of hub for community information.
Thus, I think it's best to keep all of that on the Community page, and remove the feeds from start.fpo again. It really adds too much noise IMO.
Anyway, I'll give it some more thought next week.
As for the Google topic, those are all valid points but it's probably something to discuss on a different list. For now, I think the content is good enough: everybody is familiar with Google, and the CC filters add a nice touch that for instance Firefox's search bar doesn't provide. I just want to give start.fpo a quick facelift. :)
Jef
[1] http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/temp/menubar.png
[2] http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/temp/start1.png
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