[Actionchix] State of the new website

[chris]

On Sun, 2006-06-25 at 11:11 -0700, Val Henson wrote:

> One concern I have is that there appear to be several
> time-sensitive pages or divisions in the architecture.  I realize this
> reflects the current web site.  What I would like to see is, instead
> of "Current courses" and "Past courses", some sort of way to figure
> quickly what the date of the last lesson was.  This naturally ages
> things into the past.  
...
sure - that makes sense. So, there would be a courses page that is a
list of all courses with a date field next to each course title. Each
course title would be a link to the page for that course.

Courses were one of the potential content types that I was unsure of
because some courses list out links to the email archives for that
course and other courses were summarized in html by their authors. 

So, if you're an instructor and you're maintaining a courses page, how
that that look in an ideal world?  

I could see a form with a field for email archive links and an optional
field for a summary or overview, however, I haven't taught lc courses,
so I'm guessing.

> 
> I'm afraid I don't particularly like the new web site design (under
> the link to "comps").  Like Akk, I think the web standard of
> navigation links on the left sidebar makes sense.  Having two sidebars
> shrinks down available page real estate for content; add the top side
> bar and we're getting really low bandwidth.  I also never liked
> navigation bars across the top.  
Yes, I agree that for small viewports, left side navigation is better. 

Could you and/or Akkana, please suggest a minimum viewport size?

> I don't like the color; yellow of any
> shade is not high on my list of great colors on my computer screen.
> Combine that with the rising Sun version of the tuxroboto logo and it
> makes me wince.
I'm not attached to the color. I liked the blue that Mairin used, but
thought it was too similar to the old Fedora header.

> 
> I really want to see a low-graphics, low-overhead, extremely simple
> 3-color web site in soothing colors.  Please don't make me learn CSS
> just to submit a clean, Google-style, navigation-bar-on-left web site
> design.
Page weight will probably be between 15-30k which is pretty low. So, I
disagree that overhead is an issue. But I'm happy to play around with it
and do a version without the top bar color (I get the sense that's what
bothers you the most in the design?).


> For one method of doing nested navigation that keeps all the
> navigation on the left sidebar, see:
> 
> http://www.bitkeeper.com/Sales.html
> 
> This site still has two extra navigation bars, but at least they are
> entirely redundant to the information in the left-hand sidebar.

If the linuxchix site were to follow this navigation pattern, what would
go in the top section?