[ZWeb] A new proposal (long)

seb bacon seb@jamkit.com
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 20:00:08 +0100


Trevor,

thanks for your feedback.  Note that many of your points are about 
Information Architecture - positioning of elements on pages, 
nomenclature, etc - and this thread is about visual design.  Much of the 
content on Olivier's layouts is 'made up'.  Paul is in charge of 
producing an Information Architecture (by today I believe).

I am in charge of making sure the project moves on.  I'm afraid now is 
not the time for any large changes to the design, since we simply must 
move on with the next stages.

I agree about justified text, and that the navigation could be visually 
more separate.

I also like the idea of a strap line.

> Final feedback is that this design is not enough of a departure from the
> existing zope.org page to make a difference.  It does not improve upon the
> targeted purpose of making the page more friendly for the purpose of
> increasing the adoption of Zope by first time viewers of the page.
> Those of us that invested unnecessary time exploring zope.org for useful
> information now know where to find it.  Therefore we dont need a new design.
> The new design should be to grow the community...hopefully attracting much
> more talented programmers than I who can contribute to the core and to
> Product development.
 >
> Suggestion: re-evaluate the content areas with a question like "What is the
> main objective of the home page and of the website?" and then "Does the
> layout provide clear descriptions for people to navigate to their area of
> interest in one-click?"

We've done a lot of work on this already.  See the survey feedback 
summary for some data regarding peoples' feelings about the site 
(below).  In general, people like the current design, it's just the 
structure which is poor.  That is why there has been a separate 
information architecture stage.  There is (just) still time to feed back 
into that.  In particular, I feel we need more detail on the site 
taxonomy.  I've provided some links below to the work that's already 
been done.  Please, please provide some more feedback on this part of 
the project!

Survey Responses:
  http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZOST/ZopeOrgReorg/SurveyResponses

Paul's draft IA (writeup of IRC meeting):
  http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZOST/ZopeOrgReorg/Apr02Results

Lennart's take on it + thread:
  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-web/2002-March/001067.html

seb