[Haskell-cafe] Haskell.org re-design

[Christopher Done]

This is a post about re-designing the whole Haskell web site.

We got a new logo but didn't really take it any further. For a while there's
been talk about a new design for the Haskell web site, and there are loads
of web pages about Haskell that don't follow a theme consistent with
Haskell.org's, probably because it doesn't really have a proper theme.

I'm not a designer so take my suggestion with a grain of salt, but something
that showed pictures of the latest events and the feeds we currently have
would be nice. The feeds let you know that the community is busy, and
pictures tell you that we are human and friendly.

Anyway, I came up with something to kick off a discussion:

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Haskell-homepage-idea.png

It answers the basic questions:

   - What's Haskell?
   - Where am I on the site? (Answered by a universally recognised tab menu)
   - What's it like?
   - How do I learn it?
   - Does it have an active community?
   - What's going on in the community? What are they making?
   - This language is weird. Are they human? -- Yes. The picture of a recent
   event can fade from one to another with jQuery.

The colours aren't the most exciting, but someone who's a professional
designer could do a proper design. But I like the idea of the site being
like this; really busy but not scarily busy.

Subsections of the site could use the header and footer and heading theme,
but have a completely different primary-content layout. Probably
sub-sections would need a left-nav. Keeping the design simple like this also
makes it easy to theme the current Wiki to fit in with it seamlessly.

Personally I don't have a problem with the existing site, functionally. It
has all the stuff I want to look at. The only stuff that I had issue with as
a newbie was finding The One Book I Should Read and The One Download I
Should Get. The current site is starting to address this with a "Download
Haskell" button. However, looking at it as a marketing site, it does look
pretty lame and messy, and it gives you that impression of Haskell. So if
people who own the site are going to redesign it, I thought I'd contribute a
bit.

Anyway, please contribute your ideas. (Again, I'm not a designer, so you
don't need to pick at the aesthetics, a real designer can sort that out.)

Cheers!
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