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

[Ketil Malde]

Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> writes:

> 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.

Feedback seems rather easy to get, but I think it's better with somebody
with ability and inclination just takes charge.

Anyway, some suggestions for the wiki theme:

The blurb ("Haskell is an..") is nice, and I'm just dying to click on
the links from the text, but it could do with more of them. "Open
source" could perhaps point to licensing and the proliferation of
Hackage packages, "twenty years of cutting edge research" could point to
the history of Haskell, "active community" could link to a list of
blogs, IRC, mail, etc.  The list of debuggers, profilers etc is
good, although I'd like a link to the quickcheck family of tools
somewhere.  "Performance" is also missing, we used to(?) do well on the
shootout, and it's a common concern.

I don't mind the italics much, but I don't like the sans serif on the
rest of the page.

The brown slab at the top seems a bit lonely, perhaps the right and left
sidebars should have the same color, framing the page proper?

Colors are generally good, beige and orange gives a calm, soothing
effect.  But then I'm an Ubuntu user :-)  The warm summer theme from the
platform is better, though, so if somebody wants to port that, I'm in
favor. 

The logo seems out of place, and should have navigation underneath.

Two text panes with different colors look somewhat odd to me, and the
list of hackage updates is great, perhaps it should be smaller in size
and have date stamps to better show the activity?  Currently it makes
the page too long, nobody is going to scroll all the way down to the
footer.

Anyway.  I hope this is useful, and will let this particular bikeshed
rest for now.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants