RFC: Proposed new web site design

[Daniel Scharrer]

The new user-centric design looks promising. Contrary to some others I
quite like the round corners and more modern look. Here are a few
observations:

- Light gray text on a white background is not so nice.

- I thought it was called "Wine" and not "WINE" now. Shouldn't the
"logo" at the top left reflect this?

- I don't really like the icons too much: As others mentioned, a
simple down arrow for the 'Download' icon might be better and the
Development icon is really non-intuitive. Better alternatives would be
gears or a wrench (or both).

Also, I don't see a reason for them being buttons instead of just the
icons over the background. Putting the icons into a box just detracts
from the icons themselves, at least for me.

Also, would it kill to user other colors than than those dictated by
the theme for the icons? Compare this to http://www.openoffice.org/
which I'm guessing this design is based on.

- I think a big "Compatibility" link, as done in the re-layout, really
belongs onto the front page. I'm guessing many users will want to know
if their favorite app runs with wine before the download link even
becomes relevant, both for users who are deciding weather to switch to
Linux / Mac and those that just want to find out if there is any
reason to upgrade from the Wine version that ships with their distro.

- As many others, I also despise secondary scroll bars. Right now the
news content shows way too much redundancy: The "Latest Releases" box,
the title of the latest news entry as well as it's first sentence all
just say "The latest Wine version is 1.1.8" and they are right next to
each other. Is there some way to combine this?

How about just:

Latest stable release (links to release page)
Latest release (also links to it's own release page)
Release date.
Major changes.

1/2 Non-release news items (WWN,...)

Also, even when resizing the browser window to the point where a
horizontal scroll bar appears there is still quite a bit of white
space in the center, yet the news box has a small fixed width that
forces line breaks in the release change summary bullet points.

+1 To the idea of getting screenshots back on the page, it's
surprising how much a little eye candy can do.They should however be
more up to date (perhaps automatically linked from platinum apps on
the AppDB) and as was suggested link back to the relevant AppDB entry.


Regards,
Daniel Scharrer