[Haskell-cafe] Design for 2010.2.x series Haskell Platform site

[Thomas Schilling]

Webdesign for an open source project is pretty much doomed from the
beginning.  Design requires a few opinionated people rather than
democracy.  This is design is a result of a haskell-cafe thread which
naturally involved a lot of bikeshedding.  It has its flaws, but it's
certainly better than the old design and I know of no programming
language website that has a particular great design, either.

Sure, there's always room for improvement.  Usability tests would be
nice, but they're also time consuming.  Fighting CSS to do what you
want it to and make it work on at least all modern browsers is
annoying and a huge time sink as well.  I put the search field on the
right (it's not very useful anyway), but otherwise I disagree with
your requested changes.  I would be willing to consider a different
background image if you send me one (I may play around with a few
myself).

The logo on the left is inspired by http://www.alistapart.com.  It
works quite well on pages that are not the home page.  The main
feature of the design is that it scales quite nicely to different
screen sizes (on recent enough browsers) -- try resizing your window.
Also note that the exact contents can be edited (and probably shoud
be).

  / Thomas

On 17 July 2010 13:31, Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 17 July 2010 13:37, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> Thomas Schilling wrote:
>>> Haters gonna hate.
>> Well, I don't *hate* it. It just looks a little muddy, that's all. I tend to
>> go for bright primary colours. But, as you say, each to their own...
>> The actual layout isn't bad. A bit tall-and-thin, but otherwise OK.
>>> The new wiki will have a user preference to switch back to the default
>>> monobook style.  You can always do that if you want.  It doesn't work
>>> fully, yet, but that's on my ToDo list.
>> Heh, well, maybe if we make half a dozen styles, there will be at least one
>> that everyone is happy with. ;-)
>
> Hi Andy, thanks for the kind words. Whether we like the default theme
> or not right now, I still think it's important that the first thing a
> newbie sees makes a good impression. The fact that you can change the
> default theme to something else is irrelevant. Personally I agree it's
> a bit Ubuntu without the modernness, it's more Age of Empires/CIV,
> we-do-archeology-with-our-italics-serif-font (I find it a chore to
> read, can't imagine what people who aren't native to the Latin
> character would think), and the Haskell logo is oddly placed so that
> it looks more like an advertisement, search should always be on the
> right hand side, navigation should really be on the left, putting on
> the right is iffy. I do like the orange links. But also if we liked
> it, regardless, we should do user testing (checkout Don't Make Me
> Think, Rocket Surgery Made Easy).
>
> Sadly nobody has the time nor inclination to do proper web development
> and actually test designs and get feedback, so I suppose we're working
> with the time we've got. At least with theme support, we can write a
> load of themes, and then perhaps do a vote on what people think makes
> the best impression as a default. That seems most efficient and fair.
> I'll certainly make a couple.
>
> Hats off to Thomas for implementing a more friendly theme.
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-- 
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to
consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the
family Anatidae on our hands.