Steinar H. Gunderson said... | |On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:33:01PM +0200, Christoph Rauch wrote: |>I'm going to ask a graphic-designer, who is a friend of me, to help us with |>the design or layout. Perhaps we could have some input from a different |>viewpoint. (user vs. developer) In terms of layout, the gimp site is head and shoulders above the vast majority of sites out there now. I think if we have a redesign there should be a good reason for it. A fersh look is NOT important. Fresh content is far more important. Consistency is a *good* thing. Marketers will tell you that you have to change the site to make it moer appealing,. keep people coming back. We don;t want them to come back to see the *site* - we want them to find the information tehy need, to make the GIMP more useful, to help the GIMP community, etc. If we happen to win awards, that's great, but not crucial. It actually *annoys* people to go to a favorite site and suddenly have to hunt for things. The GIMP menus haev been copied by a number of sites. People love it. The things they don't love are broken links and stale, outdated content. That's where the effort should go. I know, I know. Since we're probably going to rewrite the site in something less arcane and more known, now is the ideal time to revamp the look and feel. Let's just make sure it's worth the effort, and we don't lose things - like the top notch menu system, etc. |Just notice that being a good paper designer does _not_ neccessarily |make you a good web designer. The web is a really special medium, and |most `conventional' designers tend not to understand its ways -- and you |end up with slow, unnavigatable, resolution-fixed crap. Amen. A lot of sites that started out useful are completely absurd now, and I avoid many of the sites I once considered essential to my job, news, and the web experience (whatever that is 8^) in general. -Miles
