RFC: Website redesign

RFC: Website redesign

[Dill]

I was looking at the main git site and thought that maybe it could be
done differently. I tried to make it simple and professional looking
and have all the same information as the old site. I've spend a good
portion of the day hashing it out and wanted to hear what others
thought. Worth changing? Like it or not?

Main one:
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git

Alternate looks:
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git4
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git3
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git2

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Jonas Fonseca]

Hello Dill,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Dill <sarpulhu@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was looking at the main git site and thought that maybe it could be
>  done differently. I tried to make it simple and professional looking
>  and have all the same information as the old site. I've spend a good
>  portion of the day hashing it out and wanted to hear what others
>  thought. Worth changing? Like it or not?

Yes, it is definitely worth changing. In all the user surveys to date people
has commented on the design of the git homepage mentioning words like
ugly, not useful, strangely named, etc. After the last survey I registered
git-scm.org to have a more friendly name.

Question is what kind of "official" home page is suitable for git? As it is now,
most projects using git provides documentation for what kind of workflow
they recommend for their specific project, and else the git distribution point
on kernel.org has the latest manpages, tutorials etc. supplemented by the
git wiki.

Your examples capture this very good in the sense that the homepage should
basically be a very simple page that send visitors in the "right" direction for
getting documentation, downloading the latest release, and joining the
community.
I like the restlet.org page with its four basic tasks. As your
examples also suggest
and as a fourth task, it could be nice to also in time fill the void
of having a news
source about git related releases, developer interviews, GSoC info, the Msysgit
Herald, and other interesting stuff happening in the community for people who do
not feel they have the time to read the mailing list. This of course
requires that there
is a small dedicated team for collecting and preparing these updates. I would be
willing to help, but have occasional fall-outs where I do not read the
mailing list.

Regarding the design/style etc, I am credited for the current one that
Petr forked from
the ELinks homepage. It is ugly, and git deserved better! This is just
to say that I probably
shouldn't be part of this work. I find your redesign proposal 1, 3 and
4 a too dark or gray.
Number 2 (git2) with its bluish has some nice ideas. The text might be
too small, at least
from what I am seeing and the list menu has a strange coloring.

If the home page should carry news it needs to have infrastructure so
that we don't need
to bug Petr each time it should be updated. I have commit access to
the git-homepage
repo and maybe Petr could add others as well, but the question is if
we want some web
interface for submitting news. I registered git-scm.org after the last
survey and right now
it is just set up as an alias for git.or.cz. It comes with some PHP
capability which could
serve as a place to develop a redesign, however, I am not hosting it
myself and I don't
know what kind of traffic will be required.

-- 
Jonas Fonseca

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Dill]

Isn't it possible to set up a git repo that has all the web page files
and have it set up so the web site updates from that repo. Or just
have Petr run a few commands. Or maybe that's what happens already.
Then allow a few people to write to that repo. As far as the news go,
the web page I set up is easily edited by hand and updated it's just
how do we quickly allow updates without bothering people. Heres some
more designs:

http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git5
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git6  -my personal favorite
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git7

Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> Hello Dill,
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Dill <sarpulhu@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was looking at the main git site and thought that maybe it could be
> >  done differently. I tried to make it simple and professional looking
> >  and have all the same information as the old site. I've spend a good
> >  portion of the day hashing it out and wanted to hear what others
> >  thought. Worth changing? Like it or not?
>
> Yes, it is definitely worth changing. In all the user surveys to date people
> has commented on the design of the git homepage mentioning words like
> ugly, not useful, strangely named, etc. After the last survey I registered
> git-scm.org to have a more friendly name.
>
> Question is what kind of "official" home page is suitable for git? As it is now,
> most projects using git provides documentation for what kind of workflow
> they recommend for their specific project, and else the git distribution point
> on kernel.org has the latest manpages, tutorials etc. supplemented by the
> git wiki.
>
> Your examples capture this very good in the sense that the homepage should
> basically be a very simple page that send visitors in the "right" direction for
> getting documentation, downloading the latest release, and joining the
> community.
> I like the restlet.org page with its four basic tasks. As your
> examples also suggest
> and as a fourth task, it could be nice to also in time fill the void
> of having a news
> source about git related releases, developer interviews, GSoC info, the Msysgit
> Herald, and other interesting stuff happening in the community for people who do
> not feel they have the time to read the mailing list. This of course
> requires that there
> is a small dedicated team for collecting and preparing these updates. I would be
> willing to help, but have occasional fall-outs where I do not read the
> mailing list.
>
> Regarding the design/style etc, I am credited for the current one that
> Petr forked from
> the ELinks homepage. It is ugly, and git deserved better! This is just
> to say that I probably
> shouldn't be part of this work. I find your redesign proposal 1, 3 and
> 4 a too dark or gray.
> Number 2 (git2) with its bluish has some nice ideas. The text might be
> too small, at least
> from what I am seeing and the list menu has a strange coloring.
>
> If the home page should carry news it needs to have infrastructure so
> that we don't need
> to bug Petr each time it should be updated. I have commit access to
> the git-homepage
> repo and maybe Petr could add others as well, but the question is if
> we want some web
> interface for submitting news. I registered git-scm.org after the last
> survey and right now
> it is just set up as an alias for git.or.cz. It comes with some PHP
> capability which could
> serve as a place to develop a redesign, however, I am not hosting it
> myself and I don't
> know what kind of traffic will be required.
>
> --
> Jonas Fonseca
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Wincent Colaiuta]

El 14/4/2008, a las 17:38, Dill escribió:
> Isn't it possible to set up a git repo that has all the web page files
> and have it set up so the web site updates from that repo. Or just
> have Petr run a few commands. Or maybe that's what happens already.
> Then allow a few people to write to that repo. As far as the news go,
> the web page I set up is easily edited by hand and updated it's just
> how do we quickly allow updates without bothering people. Heres some
> more designs:
>
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git5
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git6  -my personal favorite
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git7

With all due respect, all of the designs you've posted look like  
_weblog_ templates, and that doesn't seem appropriate to me for a  
software website. One of the things I most dislike about the weblog  
format is the fixed-width centre column and the large tracks of wasted  
space down the sides; although the official site is certainly "bare  
bones" (some would say "ugly") at the moment, at least the information  
density is high and there isn't any wasted space.

Cheers,
Wincent

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Sverre Rabbelier]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> wrote:
>  With all due respect, all of the designs you've posted look like _weblog_
> templates, and that doesn't seem appropriate to me for a software website.
> One of the things I most dislike about the weblog format is the fixed-width
> centre column and the large tracks of wasted space down the sides; although
> the official site is certainly "bare bones" (some would say "ugly") at the
> moment, at least the information density is high and there isn't any wasted
> space.

That is most probably due to that the templates googlepages offer are
mostly aimed at such weblogs. I think the suggestions are not just for
layout but also for color (which is very important, to me at least,
when deciding whether a webpage is 'damn ugly' or 'quite nice').

Also I think that the main page should not contain more information
than fits in one 'screen'. That is, there should be no scrollbar on
'sensible' (say, above 1024*768) resolutions. To me a site feels
'overfull' if it's mainpage has a scrolbarr. Instead, I think the
mainpage should be a portal to other parts of the website, instead
of... well... everything-crammed-on-one-page-so that.... so that what?
What purpose does it serve to put all information, ungrouped, not easy
to find, and as such chaotic, on one page?

Anyway... </rant>

Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Anand Kumria]

On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:29:00 +0200, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com>
> wrote:
>>  With all due respect, all of the designs you've posted look like
>>  _weblog_
>> templates, and that doesn't seem appropriate to me for a software
>> website. One of the things I most dislike about the weblog format is
>> the fixed-width centre column and the large tracks of wasted space down
>> the sides;

That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".

<http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>

One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.

I think the designs are a good first starting point. 

You have a range of colour schemes there, I think you need to pick one or 
two visuals -- and some appropriate icons (3D pandas? bender the robot? 
herring?) as well.

Cheers,
Anand

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Dmitry Potapov]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
> 
> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
> 
> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
> 
> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
> 
> I think the designs are a good first starting point. 

And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!
Result:  	 Failed validation, 83 Errors 

BTW, validator.w3.org does not catch every problem. In particular, it
does not detect problems with CSS. So, it is likely to be much more...

Dmitry

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Anand Kumria]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
>> 
>> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
>> 
>> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
>> 
>> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
>> 
>> I think the designs are a good first starting point.
> 
> And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:

I'm sure you had some useful information to add, but it hasn't come 
across. I've indicated that 'this; page notes current design style and 
that it calls out a particular free software project (mozilla) for its 
excellence.

But let's continue your, rather pointless, exercise:

http://git.or.cz/ - invalid, 9 errors

http://mozilla.org/ - valid, 1 warning

So well designed, and valid markup are possible.

Anand

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Dill]

For what it's worth my pages had zero errors. ;)  And if it was up to
me, which it isn't I'd vote that the page change to this:
http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git7 (minus the madison word of
course)

On Apr 14, 9:24 pm, Anand Kumria <wildf...@progsoc.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
>
> >> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
>
> >> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
>
> >> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
>
> >> I think the designs are a good first starting point.
>
> > And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:
>
> I'm sure you had some useful information to add, but it hasn't come
> across. I've indicated that 'this; page notes current design style and
> that it calls out a particular free software project (mozilla) for its
> excellence.
>
> But let's continue your, rather pointless, exercise:
>
> http://git.or.cz/- invalid, 9 errors
>
> http://mozilla.org/- valid, 1 warning
>
> So well designed, and valid markup are possible.
>
> Anand
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
> the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Dill]

Perhaps we should just make the home page a wiki! It would work really
good! If we use a theme like they do at wiki.ubuntu.com or somewhere
else we could make it look really nice for a home page. Then once it's
set up, no one has to manage the page, worry about commits, who's
doing what, etc, and just have the pages edited and worked on by the
community at large who register at the site to edit. (Unlike the wiki
in use now something would have to be done to stop the spam, like
having those boxes at registration where you have pick the letters
out) Once set up it would simplify things. Do I dare say that Hg uses
the wiki idea. Works but their theme really looks horrible. Of course
git would do it better. ;) Ours would be way more pretty! Anyone else
think a wiki would work for home page? If we could get some work done
on the theme on moinmoin and get it upgraded and completely set up we
could do a mockup of what it could look like and if people like it
just get rid of the old and have the wiki page be the start page. It
would also solve the news problem as I'm willing and I'm sure others
would too edit to make sure it's up to date.

Others that make moinmoin look good:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
http://live.gnome.org/
https://wiki.edubuntu.org/Edubuntu?action=show


On Apr 14, 11:05 pm, Dill <sarpu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For what it's worth my pages had zero errors. ;)  And if it was up to
> me, which it isn't I'd vote that the page change to this:http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git7(minus the madison word of
> course)
>
> On Apr 14, 9:24 pm, Anand Kumria <wildf...@progsoc.org> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> > > On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
>
> > >> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
>
> > >> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
>
> > >> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
>
> > >> I think the designs are a good first starting point.
>
> > > And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:
>
> > I'm sure you had some useful information to add, but it hasn't come
> > across. I've indicated that 'this; page notes current design style and
> > that it calls out a particular free software project (mozilla) for its
> > excellence.
>
> > But let's continue your, rather pointless, exercise:
>
> >http://git.or.cz/-invalid, 9 errors
>
> >http://mozilla.org/-valid, 1 warning
>
> > So well designed, and valid markup are possible.
>
> > Anand
>
> > --
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
> > the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
> > More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
> the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Jakub Narebski]

Dill <sarpulhu@gmail.com> writes:

> Perhaps we should just make the home page a wiki! It would work really
> good! If we use a theme like they do at wiki.ubuntu.com or somewhere
> else we could make it look really nice for a home page. Then once it's
> set up, no one has to manage the page, worry about commits, who's
> doing what, etc, and just have the pages edited and worked on by the
> community at large who register at the site to edit. 

First, as far as I now all _popular_ wikis offer quite limited markup.

Second, current git homepage has information about latest release, and
latest release date etc. updated *automatically*, by the script IIRC
examinimg announcement on git mailing list.  This I think would be not
possible with wiki.

> (Unlike the wiki in use now something would have to be done to stop
> the spam, like having those boxes at registration where you have
> pick the letters out).

If you have wiki which is popular page you would have spam.  Or you
wouldn't have contributors (or at least as many contributors) if you
would bring barriers to entry (e.g. register to edit, validation via
email, CAPTCHA) against spam.

[cut] 
Many more projects IMVHO have _both_ homepage and wiki, than only wiki
(wiki as homepage).

P.S. Please do not toppost.  If your post doesn't refer to the message
you are replying to, simply post it as clean message, without quoted
text.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:48:21PM -0700, Dill wrote:
> Perhaps we should just make the home page a wiki! It would work really
> good! If we use a theme like they do at wiki.ubuntu.com or somewhere
> else we could make it look really nice for a home page. Then once it's
> set up, no one has to manage the page, worry about commits, who's
> doing what, etc, and just have the pages edited and worked on by the
> community at large who register at the site to edit. (Unlike the wiki
> in use now something would have to be done to stop the spam, like
> having those boxes at registration where you have pick the letters
> out) Once set up it would simplify things. Do I dare say that Hg uses
> the wiki idea. Works but their theme really looks horrible. Of course
> git would do it better. ;) Ours would be way more pretty! Anyone else
> think a wiki would work for home page? If we could get some work done
> on the theme on moinmoin and get it upgraded and completely set up we
> could do a mockup of what it could look like and if people like it
> just get rid of the old and have the wiki page be the start page. It
> would also solve the news problem as I'm willing and I'm sure others
> would too edit to make sure it's up to date.

  let's keep two things separate here: design and content. Design-wise,
it does not matter if it is wiki or not, it is a completely different
issue. And making the wiki look good would be non-trivial amount of work
and the benefits seem unclear to me - so far, we aren't exactly drowning
in patches for the website either (though I admit that some of them
might have been lost anyway if the contributor was unlucky and not
persistent enough ;-).

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.	-- J. W. von Goethe

Git Homepge Update

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi,

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 01:57:41PM +0200, Petr Baudis wrote:
>   let's keep two things separate here: design and content. Design-wise,
> it does not matter if it is wiki or not, it is a completely different
> issue. And making the wiki look good would be non-trivial amount of work
> and the benefits seem unclear to me - so far, we aren't exactly drowning
> in patches for the website either (though I admit that some of them
> might have been lost anyway if the contributor was unlucky and not
> persistent enough ;-).

  by the way, I have read through the homepage again after some time and
tweaked the text a bit for clarity and perhaps grammar (hope I didn't
make it worse than it was). I have also reorganized the Related Tools
section and rewrote the initial paragraph.

  Design-wise, I have added some extra spacing at many places, turned
the Related Tools section to a 2x2 grid to take less vertical space and
redone the main headline.  Also, I tried to tweak the color scheme to
use brighter and less nauseating colors - please tell me what do you
think!

  I'm wondering whether perhaps the page is still too wide now - one
idea would be to move the header, the two link boxes and possibly some
of the contact information to a sidebar - the link boxes always looked a
bit strange to me. I'm not sure how much would it help, though.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.	-- J. W. von Goethe

Re: Git Homepge Update

[Steve Hoelzer]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:
>   I'm wondering whether perhaps the page is still too wide now - one
>  idea would be to move the header, the two link boxes and possibly some
>  of the contact information to a sidebar - the link boxes always looked a
>  bit strange to me. I'm not sure how much would it help, though.

Yes, a bit wide, I think. A sidebar is one option, or just keep the
page as-is and limit width via CSS.

    body { max-width: 50em; margin: 0.4em auto; }

Steve

Re: Git Homepge Update

[Jakub Narebski]

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

>   By the way, I have read through the homepage again after some time and
> tweaked the text a bit for clarity and perhaps grammar (hope I didn't
> make it worse than it was). I have also reorganized the Related Tools
> section and rewrote the initial paragraph.
> 
>   Design-wise, I have added some extra spacing at many places, turned
> the Related Tools section to a 2x2 grid to take less vertical space

IMHO it is not a good idea.  First, because it decreases page height
by a unsignificant amount; we still need scrollbar.  Second, more
important imho that this 2x2 grid contains _unrelated_ information
which belong in _different_ sections, namely 3 subsections of git
related tools, and one completely unrelated on git _hosting_.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Dmitry Potapov]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 03:24:50AM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
> >> 
> >> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
> >> 
> >> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
> >> 
> >> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
> >> 
> >> I think the designs are a good first starting point.
> > 
> > And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:
> 
> I'm sure you had some useful information to add, but it hasn't come 
> across. 

I would never call a page with more than 83 problems as a good starting
point, but I am sure for someone who alleges to make the best web
design, it should not be too difficult to correct that.

BTW, "Web 2.0" does not refer to any specific visual design but implies
semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup among other things.  So, I am
not quite sure what you meant by saying "Web 2.0 style".


Dmitry

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Jakub Narebski]

Anand Kumria <wildfire@progsoc.org> writes:

> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
>>> 
>>> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
>>> 
>>> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>
>>> 
>>> One of the "hotties" is a software project, and Free Software at that.
>>> 
>>> I think the designs are a good first starting point.
>> 
>> And here is what validator.w3.org says about this page:

Please do not remove _important_ information. I have added what you
should have quoted below:

>> This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!
>> Result:  	 Failed validation, 83 Errors 
 
> I'm sure you had some useful information to add, but it hasn't come 
> across. I've indicated that 'this; page notes current design style and 
> that it calls out a particular free software project (mozilla) for its 
> excellence.
> 
> But let's continue your, rather pointless, exercise:
> 
> http://git.or.cz/ - invalid, 9 errors

And when _examining_ this error one would realize that _all_ those
errors are in _single_, old style (using unencoded ampersands) URL.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Petr Baudis]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 12:53:10AM -0700, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Anand Kumria <wildfire@progsoc.org> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:33:39 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> > 
> >> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:39:00PM +0000, Anand Kumria wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> That is basically the current "Web 2.0 style".
> >>> 
> >>> <http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm>

Thanks for this link, I find it quite insightful - and at the same time
I believe that the changes to the current homepage could be much less
radical to significantly improve the design and flow of the page
according to the principles described there.

> > But let's continue your, rather pointless, exercise:
> > 
> > http://git.or.cz/ - invalid, 9 errors
> 
> And when _examining_ this error one would realize that _all_ those
> errors are in _single_, old style (using unencoded ampersands) URL.

Ha! Good catch, and all the parameters are actually useless - fixed,
thanks. :-)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.	-- J. W. von Goethe

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Petr Baudis]

Please do not top-post, it makes it more difficult to follow the thread
and reply.

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 08:38:25AM -0700, Dill wrote:
> Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> > If the home page should carry news it needs to have infrastructure
> > so that we don't need to bug Petr each time it should be updated. I
> > have commit access to the git-homepage repo and maybe Petr could add
> > others as well, but the question is if we want some web interface
> > for submitting news. I registered git-scm.org after the last survey
> > and right now it is just set up as an alias for git.or.cz. It comes
> > with some PHP capability which could serve as a place to develop a
> > redesign, however, I am not hosting it myself and I don't know what
> > kind of traffic will be required.

The server currently hosting git.or.cz could run PHP too if it would
make sense. I'd of course prefer Perl (and it would be easier to set
up), but I probably wouldn't do much of the coding myself, so it's not
up to me to decide.

> Isn't it possible to set up a git repo that has all the web page files
> and have it set up so the web site updates from that repo. Or just
> have Petr run a few commands. Or maybe that's what happens already.

This is exactly the current setup: http://repo.or.cz/w/git-homepage.git

> Then allow a few people to write to that repo. As far as the news go,
> the web page I set up is easily edited by hand and updated it's just
> how do we quickly allow updates without bothering people. Heres some
> more designs:
> 
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git5
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git6  -my personal favorite
> http://sarpulhu.googlepages.com/git7

I appreciate the effort, but frankly, I simply personally like the
current layout much more - the design certainly has quirks, but I don't
really find it bad; I also think that the current amount of content does
not justify splitting to multiple pages. The newly proposed version
looks to me just as barebone graphically as the old one, with the same
level of navigability but wasting screen estate and requiring more
clicks to get where you need.

That said, this can (and quite probably does) merely mean that I simply
have no taste at all and should be kept away from any kind of web
design! :-) So, I do not want to inhibit progress at all, but before
considering to adopt the new design, I would prefer to see wider
feedback from the core members of the community to convince me that I'm
wrong.

Something in the style of earlier mentioned restlet.org might not be
necessarily bad (though I'm slightly wary of too toyish-looking
graphics), but it appears to me that graphically, that site is simply on
a completely different level than the current proposals. But if someone
would do some cute design, I believe the current layout could look quite
nice too - after all, consider http://bazaar-vcs.org/ (modulo the wiki
artifacts plague).

Kind regards,

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.	-- J. W. von Goethe

Re: RFC: Website redesign

[Junio C Hamano]

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

> I appreciate the effort, but frankly, I simply personally like the
> current layout much more - the design certainly has quirks, but I don't
> really find it bad; I also think that the current amount of content does
> not justify splitting to multiple pages. The newly proposed version
> looks to me just as barebone graphically as the old one, with the same
> level of navigability but wasting screen estate and requiring more
> clicks to get where you need.
>
> That said, this can (and quite probably does) merely mean that I simply
> have no taste at all and should be kept away from any kind of web
> design! :-) So, I do not want to inhibit progress at all, but before
> considering to adopt the new design, I would prefer to see wider
> feedback from the core members of the community to convince me that I'm
> wrong.

I always wish that any proposal for change is countered by silent
satisfied customers expressing why the current one is good, and this is a
perfect opportunity for me to do so as I am just a satisfied customer of
git.or.cz, who is not involved in the building side at all.

If I recall correctly, the old old site was split like how the sarpulhu
sample page shows, a sketchy top page with links to other pages.  It is
tempting to build a sparse scaffolding in the expectation that each page
will be filled with rich contents later, and the fear of having too many
things in one page drives people to make the initial scaffolding too
sparse.  But as you say, the current "single page that is not too long
describes all the necessary things and points people at outside resources"
format is much nicer.

I happen to also like one aspect of visual behaviour of git.or.cz better
than the sarpulhu sample page.  The former widens as I resize my browser
window, the latter doesn't.