Less Personal :-) (was: Re: [libreoffice-website] Re: Personal Statement)

Hi Bernhard, all!

Am Donnerstag, den 16.12.2010, 01:39 +0100 schrieb Bernhard Dippold:
> 1. Create a website that can be active as soon as possible.
>
> This website is the SilverStripe website (clear decision by the SC), 
> that needs content (now!) as well as design (at least to the LibO 3.3 
> release) showing the world, that we are an active community able to 
> provide professional software and present it in a professional way. 

During the last days, I was thinking about how to improve the current
website design. I know that I'm a bit late, so please consider these
ideas to be ... ideas. If some of these could be implemented - this
would be great. I'm currently sure that this will positively affect the
experience of our users ...

So, why improvements?

Although the visual and structural design of the current (static)
website has proven to work rather well, this design might not work that
good for Silverstripe. I started to draw some boundary boxes (several
days ago) for one of the pages - in a very simplified point-of-view, the
aim should be to reduce the number of lines to reduce an uncluttered
design.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/xZawms3ks-rpnvizZFN6pA?feat=directlink

In this example, there isn't even a sub-menu that will add another item
on the left hand site. Also, on some pages there seems to be a
breadcrumb menu:
http://test.libreoffice.org/features/draw/


So, I started to work on a menu concept (and iterated a lot, I fell back
to very simple but powerful version...) and added some more visual
design. Thus, here is an example for the welcome page - along with the
menus to be used on other pages:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/bbnG0Hny0SpccJIZsGp72A?feat=directlink

My assumption is, that (having users in mind, and basic developer
information as well) two menu levels should be sufficient for the page.
Thus, we can avoid using the breadcrumb. The sub-menu is directly placed
below the main menu (if required on that page).

Another nice side-effect is the search functionality (once being
available) is well integrated and also provides visual feedback if used
(usually, search leads to somehow "nowhere" on other pages).

But, of course, there are also many open points - e.g. the proper
integration of the language projects (usually offered in the upper
right), ... and how to provide such "Emotional Artwork" (in the most
simple case a static picture).

However, it would be great to know what you think ...

Cheers,
Christoph


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