Re: GNUstep.org website redesign proposal

[Doug Simons]

On Dec 31, 2013, at 5:09 AM, Markus Hitter wrote:

> Am 31.12.2013 02:09, schrieb Sebastian Reitenbach:
> 
>> https://www.l00-bugdead-prods.de/index7.html
> 
> First, big compliments for the Dock implementation. It works flawlessly
> in a mouse/trackpad driven environment.
> 
> Hovever, menus at the bottom of a web pages / windows are very unusual
> (the real thing is at the bottom of the screen, which is something
> different), so it took me a second visit to see it at all. Having a
> standard menu in the upper region suggested there's no need to search
> for navigation.

I agree that it's unexpected to have a navigation control at the bottom of the 
window, so many people will miss it. I was totally impressed by the 
implementation, though -- awesome job! And I agree with Sebastian's points 
about making the site look modern, cool, and appealing to Mac users. So why not 
move the dock to the left side? It's not the Mac OS X default, but a lot of 
people move their docks to the left so it will still be very recognizable to 
Mac users. And it's a common location for secondary web navigation controls, so 
even though it may look slightly odd to non-Mac visitors they should be able to 
use it too.

There remains the issue that it might still be slightly less obvious to folks 
using touch devices. Maybe it would be possible to add titles below the icons 
for those devices?

Overall, this looks to me like a vast improvement over the current site! I 
think the text of the first paragraph still needs work to focus it more 
tightly: drop any mention of NeXT and OpenStep, which is only a distraction 
now, and make Cocoa more prominent. Maybe something like this for the first 
paragraph:

GNUstep is an open-source framework modeled on Apple's Cocoa frameworks to 
provide a cross-platform API to make it easy to create sophisticated modern 
software. Ports of OS X software to other platforms and new software 
development in Objective-C are both supported, with or without a graphical user 
interface.

(And then be sure to include the obligatory trademark disclaimers in the fine 
print at the bottom of the page to keep Apple's lawyers from getting excited!)

Cheers,

Doug