[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell.org re-design

[Simon Marlow]

On 28/03/2010 21:44, Christopher Done wrote:
> 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.

The general design looks great, nice job.

Is the footer necessary?  I dislike sites that have too many ways to 
navigate, and the footer looks superfluous.  The footer will probably be 
off the bottom of the window in any case, which reduces its usefulness 
as a navigation tool.

If we want a tree of links for navigation, maybe the tabs at the top 
could be drop-down menus, or there could be a menu sidebar.

Cheers,
	Simon