[ZWeb] Re: website design discussion

Martijn Faassen faassen at infrae.com
Mon Sep 4 04:26:00 EDT 2006


Hey,

Tom Von Lahndorff wrote:
> http://www.modscape.com/zope
> 
> Please let me know of any bugs and what your browsers/os setup is.

Thanks for doing this work.

> Zope Foundation
> Design 1, Version 1
> 
>     * Try the nav.
>     * Updated the colors of the nav to make it stand out more.
>     * Added the "extras" box to the top right hand side of the main column.
>     * Not going to make a fluid layout because:
>           o Trading in having the space on the sides for less control 
> over all page layouts. I'm going for functional control in this case 
> over a prettier layout.
>           o The current page is laid out to work on 800 x 600 and above. 
> Most people will view the site at 1024 x 786 or 800 x 600 and not see 
> large gaps on the side.

Is 800x600 that common these days?

>           o The simple nature of the site means a thinner page is more 
> appropriate. Most of the content will be text that is easier to read the 
> less wide the page is. This is not some multi column news site that has 
> multiple content boxes.

That's too bad; it still looks like a huge amount of screen real estate 
is wasted in my browser. More than one third, though granted the screen 
on this laptop is wide (but then the browser is windowed). I'd have 
preferred something more left-aligned myself, then at least my eyes 
aren't drawn into the blue ocean when I start reading. Most sites I open 
on my laptop seem to either stretchable (perhaps only to a certain 
extent, so text doesn't flow all the way), or leave the empty space on 
the right, though there is a minority of sites that are down the middle 
like this one, in particular blogger.

I think we could have multiple content boxes by the way, at least for 
news items and for "Become a member!". The boxes being flowed inside the 
text is not really what I was looking for, and I enjoyed the boxes in 
version 3 of design 1.

>     * Not going to add a top navigation because:
>           o Its inconsistent. The navigation should be in one place. 
> period. I find Plone to be confusing and annoying in it's use of 
> seperate nav areas. 2 Navs will cause confusion on the front and back 
> end of things. Im sticking with a standard left hand navigation based on 
> an unordered list that will make sense normally, without a stylesheet, 
> on text readers, mobile browsers...

It's good it works in text readers. It's not good it doesn't work in 
Firefox 1.5 in linux. :) It still looks bad, exactly like before - the 
text just flows into each other making the navigation menu unreadable 
and therefore unusable.

I still prefer version 3 of design 1, except for the drop-down nature of 
the menus on top. I'd been happy if that just turned into a sidebar on 
the left instead of going down this route...

Regards,

Martijn



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