My WineHQ menu structure proposal

Igor Izyumin igor at mlug.missouri.edu
Sun Nov 3 08:05:01 CST 2002


On Sunday 03 November 2002 04:28 am, Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Nov 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> > This is my proposal for the WineHQ menu structure,
> > based on the discussions I had with Francois.
> >
> > The Home Page should just be our news page. Many
> > projects opt for this, and I think it's good:
> > News are 'zero' click items.
>
> I think the home page should be targeted to people who may not know what
> Wine is. Thus it should *answer* the question 'What is Wine'. The Gimp's
> web site (http://www.gimp.org/) is a good example in that respect. The
> first paragraph of the page answers the question 'What is the GIMP?'.

True, although the Gimp's website puts too much stuff above the fold.  News 
should be on the very top, right after a three-sentence explanation of what 
it is.  The rest (bugs, etc) belongs on a sidebar or floating box or 
something.

> Thus I think there should be a link to the News page but no more. The
> news page is for returning visitors and if that's what they care about
> then they should bookmark that page rather than the home page.

Completely false.  New visitors care about news as much as anyone else, and a 
healthy amount of news shows that the project is not dead.  That is very 
important - a completely static front page usually means that the main 
developer has lost interest, and I would not download a project if it looks 
like nothing happened in the last month or two.  The front page should have 
timely, relevant news, and should show what happened with Wine recently.  
That is very important: some pages might be outdated and could refer to some 
old version as being "most recent", and the user would be very confused 
unless they know that the new version was just released a day ago.

Don't be afraid of having a large front page.  That's not bad.  A lot of 
people think that it's bad when web pages scroll, and that's not bad at all.  
All of the information that is relevant in any way should be on the front 
page.  It shouldn't be overwhelming, but it should answer all the questions 
that a user might have about Wine (what it is, how much it costs, how well it 
works, etc), show the things that happened recently, and 

Besides, can you give me one example of a good website that doesn't have news 
on the front page?
-- 
-- Igor



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