[HCoop-Discuss] Site Redesign

Tue Mar 15 20:17:49 EDT 2011

Hi Lauren,
The new design looks nice. I do have a few suggestions:

1. The contrast between the green in the background and the font colors
seems to be less. The
 background color is a little distracting, and takes the eyes away from the
text. Either the background
could be a lighter shade, or the text needs to be darker/bolder to stand
out.

2. I think the content on the web page must be much less than what it is
currently - we only want
the page to be perused by people who expect to join, and we perhaps could do
with just telling
them why they should join, along with a link for how to join. A minimalist
message may drive home
the point much faster than having to wait for a info tab to slide into the
view.

The link to join must be bolder for sure - and possibly be something like a
big button near the center of
the screen like so one just can't miss it.

For instance, http://www.mailchimp.com 's design makes the join/sign up
button so prominent. Also,
most of their content is below, and needs to be scrolled into view for
someone who is interested. For
most, the temptation to click on the sign up button right away is too much
to resist :)

Certainly my suggestions are influenced by my own preferences/prejudices, so
please feel free to
ignore them :) I think that over the past few years, webpages have mostly
moved to a "less is more"
interface for at least the home page - the contrast between yahoo's homepage
and google's homepage
for example.

I do like the 'join or die' picture - I think a newcomer(perhaps not so much
for non-US citizens) would
surely find it funny.

Thank you for volunteering to design.

Avinash.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Lauren McNees <lauren at hcoop.net> wrote:

> Hello Hcoopers,
>
> I created a draft new website for hcoop. I'd like to know what people think
> and if you don't like it, what I could do to make it better/different. Once
> we agree on the appearance of it, I'll start plugging content into it.
> Thanks!
>
> http://hcoop.net/~lauren/hcoop_redesign/index.html
> http://hcoop.net/~lauren/hcoop_redesign/second_tier_page.html
>
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Clinton Ebadi <clinton at unknownlamer.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> (changed subject)
>>
>> Lauren McNees <lauren at hcoop.net> writes:
>>
>> > On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Clinton Ebadi <clinton at unknownlamer.org>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >     If you'd like to work on a better design for the hcoop.org please
>> >     do. It's one of those things that would be really nice to have
>> >     hcoop.org is pretty ugly as it is, but that I at least am utterly
>> >     incapable of.
>> >
>> >     If you want to do something about the design just let me know what
>> you
>> >     need! A good starting place is
>> >     /afs/hcoop.net/user/h/hc/hcoop/public_html/.
>> >
>> > Just to avoid confusion, its hcoop.net not hcoop.org, right? Or is
>> there a
>> > hcoop.org in the works that I don't know about?
>>
>> hcoop.net yes.
>>
>> > What is the hcoop website and members portal currently powered by? Its
>> > database-driven with css right? If I attempt to create a new look for
>> the
>> > website, should it just be a simple html/css template type thing that
>> the
>> > admins could drop the database programming into?
>>
>> The main page is static html:  ~hcoop/public_html/Makefile generates the
>> sites by calling a script:
>>
>>  - `hcoop_html' cats /etc/hcoop.header, the page body, and
>>   /etc/hcoop.footer together
>>
>> The header just contains a basic <html><head>...<body><h1>$TITLE</h1>
>> ...
>>
>> And the footer closes the <body> and document. We are most certainly
>> *not* tied to doing things this way--I suspect the static site is
>> generated this way as a quick hack.
>>
>> I copied hcoop.{header,footer} into ~hcoop/public_html so that you can
>> view them.
>>
>> The domtool manual (http://hcoop.net/domtool/) is automatically
>> generated by domtool itself. It does, however, use the same css as the
>> main site so any style improvements to that would apply to the domtool
>> manual automatically. If needed I can adjust the code that generates the
>> domtool manual to produce html more amenable to any changes to the
>> style.
>>
>> The portal uses MLT which just embeds SML into HTML ala
>> PHP. http://wiki.hcoop.net/DaemonAdmin/Portal has some information on
>> how it works--I've only done minimal work on the portal so far and I'll
>> have to get back to you on the specifics of restyling it. I CCed bpt--at
>> one point he did hack together a static mockup of a new interface for
>> the portal so he may be able to assist.
>>
>> That's the gist of it, I'll start working on a wiki page with more
>> details soon.
>>
>> --
>> "Karen loved animals. Unfortunately the cheetahs betrayed her trust,"
>> Libot said.
>>
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>>
>>
>
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