On Wed, 23 May 2001, Michael Spunt <t0mcat@xxxxxx> wrote:
I tried some stuff ony my own, too. Maybe you would like to have a look at it: http://www.technoid.f2s.com/gimp.org/index.php
Changing the navigation structure was the main goal here, so it differs from your effort.
Well, this looks interesting but I do not know if such a design is appropriate for a Gimp site. Your design is modern/futuristic, but these characteristics are not directly related to image editing, painting, or graphics in general. Someone who comes to the site without knowing what the Gimp is about (e.g., a Windows user who clicked on a button "Graphics by Gimp" on some other web page) would probably not think that she just loaded a page describing an image editing program. It would be better if the home page could show some paintbrushes, color palettes, maybe some photorealistic images (but the page should not be too "heavy"), and of course our friend Wilber. These things could easily be associated with what the Gimp is about.
Anyway, I am not sure that a completely new design for the Gimp site is necessary. It would be nice, but upating the presentation is IMHO much less urgent than updating the contents. There are many broken links to external sites, incomplete information for developers, outdated descriptions of the Gimp's features, ... If someone has the time to update both the layout and the contents (and to keep on maintaining the site for a while), then I am all for it. But if nobody has enough time to do both, then updating the layout should not delay the long-awaited updates of the contents.
In addition to some of the things mentioned in Christoph's TODO list, I would like to add a couple of things that should avoided for the Gimp's web site:
* The new layout should not break the existing URLs. Many people have bookmarked some pages on www.gimp.org, and many web sites have direct links to the download pages, to the documentation or to the mailing lists page. So even if the navigation system is redesigned, there should still be something available from the same URLs as today.
* The design should be fast and clean. It should support all browsers and should not make excesssive use of nested tables or JavaScript. The current design of www.gimp.org is OK from that point of view. But on the other hand, the GUG site is taking too long to render in Netscape 4 (2-3 seconds of delay for re-displaying any page, because of the nested tables).
* The site should not use cookies unless there is a real need for them. For example, if the site is built with PHP then it should not use the session-id cookies or any other user-tracking cookies. This is not needed and it annoys the users who have configured their browser to warn them when the server wants to set a cookie.
* The pages should be easy to bookmark and the URLs should not be too long. This means that frames are forbidden, and the systems that generate dynamic contents using horribly long URLs should also be avoided (see the bad examples from Corel below).
Maybe it could be interesting to have a look at the web sites of the companies selling similar products... You will see that all of them are using simple layouts: they do not try to impress people with nice HTML tricks; instead they simply list the features of their products and provide some simple documentation.
As an example, here are the pages that describe the new features in the lastest version of several well-known products (looking at these pages is also interesting for Gimp developers because they can give lots of good ideas for new features):
Adobe - Photoshop 6.0 http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/keyfeature1.html
Jasc - Paint Shop Pro 7 http://www.jasc.com/psp7_new.asp?
Corel - CorelDRAW 10 - features http://www3.corel.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=Corel/Product/FeatureList&fid=CC1U8HKJOEC&id=CC1IOY1YKCC
Corel - Painter 6 (previously Fractal Design, then MetaCreations) http://www3.corel.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=Corel/Product/FeatureList&fid=CC1YQHZ3SGC&id=CC1Q1IVRBAC
-Raphael
