RFC: Proposed new web site design

[Cesar Izurieta]

2008/11/24 Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org>:
> Jeremy White wrote:
>> At Wineconf, we made the decision to change the entry page to the Wine
>> web site.  The hope was to simplify and stream line it, and to put in
>> place the infrastructure to start moving more content to the Wiki.
>>
>> Jeremy Newman and Jon Parshall have put a lot of time and energy into a
>> proposed new design, following what we took away from the meetings at
>> Wineconf.
>>
>
> I thought we took away that Dan Kegel would magically pull a design out
> of his wizard's hat.  Regardless, thanks for doing the work.
>
>> A mock up of that design is up now here:
>>   http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/
>>
>> ...and the theming intended for all 'child' pages of the web site,
>> starting with the Wiki:
>>   http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/wiki.html
>>
>
> As Wine's unofficial usability evangelist, I present a quick and dirty
> review of the new design below.  Keep one point in mind: it's much
> better, and thank you for getting it done.
>
>> Beyond the normal controversy that any new design sparks there is one
>> major potential controversial change.
>>
>> That is, I am asking for prime placement on the download page on behalf
>> of CodeWeavers instead of the (stale and ugly, sorry) banner ads we used
>> in the past.  You can see our current concept around that positioning here:
>>   http://wine.codeweavers.com/winehq_new/download.html
>
> Anything is better than making our website look like it was from 1998.
> Perhaps not coincidentally, that's how many people viewed the quality of
> our software.
>
>> I hope that the general community sees that as a reasonable exchange for
>> all of the work we put into Wine and hosting the Wine server, and a vast
>> improvement over the banner ads.
>>
>> At any rate, comments and feedback are welcome.
>
> Good:
> * Much friendlier, better looking, easier to focus on what I want.
> Looks professional.
> * The prominent donate link on the front page is very recognizable.  I
> guarantee you'll have more donations as a result.
> * All the old cruft links are gone.
> * The new small icon reflects the main image on the site, and also no
> longer has the tiny artifacts that the old one did.  Impressive.
>
> Can be improved with minor tweaks:
> * The news should be clickable, and take you to a separate news page
> with slightly longer stories.
> * Rather than getting smaller when you hover the mouse over the buttons,
> it should be the other way around - highlight them and they get bigger
> * The slogan "Windows software everywhere" doesn't make much sense.  I
> would replace it with a very small boilerplate text that says what Wine
> does, namely "Wine lets you run Windows applications in Linux and on the
> Mac".  This summarizes everything for someone visiting the site who has
> never heard of Wine before.
> * The "Help!" button could be a bit friendlier, eg "Get Help" or
> "Support".  At the least, drop the exclamation point.
> * The text under Donate is obvious, so we can benefit from a bit of
> explanation.  Something like "Help volunteer Wine developers improve
> Wine" -- this also helps sell the donate button
> * The text under "Download" could be more extensive too, eg "Get the
> latest Wine packaged for your distribution" -- I don't think we lose
> much by using a short sentence here since the text is already partially
> transparent and optional to read.
> * The download icon is weird.  A large down arrow would probably be
> better than a CD, especially since we don't offer anything CD-like.
> * Similarly, using the classic "wrench" icon for development would be a
> bit more obvious.  As it is now I'm not sure what it means except for
> the word development right next to it.
>
> Bad:
> * The inlaid scrollbar under the news tab.  However, I think the proper
> way to deal with this is to simply have shorter news stories rather than
> change the scroll bar.  The current sample news (Wine 1.1.7 released),
> for instance, could easily be just 2 sentences and a link to the larger
> story.  Longer stories could be reserved for a separate news page.
>
>>
>> And in a vain attempt to prevent all the flames from scorching Jon and
>> Jeremy, I'd like to officially state how much I appreciate their efforts.
>>
>
> It looks really good in general.  I'm excited.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie
>
>
>

Here's a quick relayout with some of the ideas posted in this thread:

http://caih.org/wine/WineHQ.html