[Geany] A new look?

[Lex Trotman]

Hi,

Maybe we should have agreed on some easy problems first like religion,
politics, C coding standards before we tried web design :-)

Anyway, First of all the thing that hasn't been mentioned, "What is
this website for?"

My answer is, to provide information and resources to existing and
potential Geany users.

That means that the main page is going to be mainly navigation and
snippets of information that direct to pages with detailed info.

It isn't advertising in the traditional sense, but it should be
professional, attractive, informative and usable for all users so that
it encourages new users to try Geany and  encourages new contributors
from existing users.

2011/4/3 Росен Стоянов <f1r3fl3x at gmail.com>:
> Lex, i would also disagree with you. Sidebars(that hold the main menu) are a
> thing of the past. A good design always uses a width of around 900px (if it

There are only three reasons for having a fixed width web page:

1. most content is fixed size, eg images, videos.  Not the case for
the Geany website.

2. most content is contiguous words to be read.  In that case the
*text column* size should be in ems (max 40) not in pixels.  Better
still is automatic changes in the number of columns to keep each text
column well under 40ems (but that might be a bit complex). Some of the
Geany pages will be of this type (Manual, hacking etc.) but not the
front page.

3. your web designer is lazy and/or a control freak (I can be blunt
since you said you are not a web designer, and any web designers
reading the Geany devel list are obviously superior and would not be
in either of these categories :-)

Why should a user with a widescreen waste a huge strip either side and
someone not running the browser fullscreen have to scroll to read each
line?

> is desired to leave space on the sides). A very large portion of the users
> (based on worldwide surveys) use 1024x768 or similar resolutions, even on
> 22'' monitors... (!?!?)
> So a sidebar would only take precious space.. considering that you have to
> leave space between the menu and the content and make the font small so that

You shouldn't use fixed fonts either, you don't know what the
resolution of my monitor is or how good my eyesight is.  All text
should use my chosen size as the base case and relative sizes for
headings etc.  Yes that makes design harder, you have to use ems and
percentages as measurements, but see point 3 above.

> the labels don't make it too wide. Take a look at jEdit's website
> (jedit.org) when i opened it at fullscreen i stood speechless. The text
> stretches and thus making it somewhat hard to read. I will make this version
> of the layout, but it's considered as a bad practice for several years now..

Using a bad example of a design paradigm does not invalidate the
paradigm, there are plenty of examples of bad fixed size design too.

> Trust me i sit all day reading about user experience and front end
> development.

Poor you :-)

>
>> As I said above, newbies will if they can't find what they want.  If I
>> can't find the documentation for a new tool quickly on its website I
>> won't even bother to download it, too much of a waste of time, go
>> somewhere else
>
> Ok, i will make the Documentation button blink :D

Do that and I'll DDOS your server :-D

> Now seriously, I think that the menu is nicely divided into categories and
> easy to work your way through.

Good that will be a nice prototype for the sidebar :-)

As someone else mentioned, the link seems offline, and I can't
remember details of the menu layout so I won't comment.

> If a user, no matter experienced or not, goes to the website and wants to
> search for a plugin for Geany, he would go to the Downloads menu and click
> Third party packages (i think plugins is better!). I seriously doubt that he

Agree with plugins, lets keep consistent terminology.


> will go around the Documentation and Contribute menus :)
>
> The thing that i think needs change is separating the info and news and
> adding the screenshots to the info.
> I have a cool idea about the screenshots. I will make the changes on
> Wednesday :)
>

I'm not sure lots of screenshots are a good idea, Geany is
configurable and a look that you like, someone else may hate, eg the
dark theme, very 1970s (yes I was programming then) but some people
love it.

The slider is a nice idea although as I remember it kind of dominates
the page, but maybe that would improve with more content.

But I wonder do we have enough suitable material to put in it?
Whatever is in it must be important enough to want to shout at users,
but unimportant enough that it doesn't matter if they miss it because
they don't slide the slider.  Not sure what goes in that category, and
its a bit naf to just repeat what is immediately below it in the news
and information sections.

Cheers
Lex