Raphael made a number of excellent points regarding the site redesign. I'd like to reiterate some of them and add something. |* 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). They should also work if JavaScript is not available. Links should be links - not JS calls! |* 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). I work for a software company whose products handle content management, personalization, etc. [It doesn't run on linux, and it's much more complex and resource intensive than we need, so I haven't pursued trying to get a copy.] I've worked on the GUI, in professional services doing work for clients and in applications. The above points turn out to be absolutely critical if you want a really useful site for the vast majority of users - especially if you care about a wide cross-section of users from techiphobes to technophiles. And while I know this is a mind-boggling concept, we should make sure the pages work even if there is no image delivery. -Miles
