[Actionchix] State of the new website

[Akkana Peck]

chris writes:
> 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?  

The main thing is that the email has already been sent to the list,
so that page is already available without a lot of extra work
converting it. I didn't know that the archive links could change
(as Mary mentions in a followup); I thought they just followed the
date the message was posted.

I suppose in an ideal world we could have a course framework where
the lessons could live on the website in html (with styling and
images and whatever is needed) and an easy way for instructors to
add each new lesson. Not all instructors have the password to add
pages to the site.

I don't know if students would rather have email lessons or links to a
web page. It might be interesting to take a poll on the courses list.

One thing I'd like to mention: with the old Zope site it was a lot
of extra steps to add a new lesson, because I had to add it once in
the sidebar for the course and then again in the course's main page.
A lot of the old pages are designed like that, with the same links
on the sidebar and in the main page. If we could have some sort of
standard template for courses, and a way of updating them that
involves adding the new lesson link in just one place, that would
save some work for whoever maintains the course page. (Though the
main reason it was a problem was the extremely slow round trips through
zope and the old server, and that shouldn't be a problem any more!)

> 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.

The issue for instructors is very simple: you sent all this plaintext to
the mailing list already; now what should you put on your course page?

> Yes, I agree that for small viewports, left side navigation is better. 
> 
> Could you and/or Akkana, please suggest a minimum viewport size?

Please don't require anything wider than 800 pixels.

I personally think pages should scale quite a bit smaller
than that, and should be viewable on small handheld devices and
older laptops with 800px or less resolution (my husband still uses a
laptop with an 800x600 screen; it's less than 5 years old and still
works perfectly well except for web pages that insist on newer
hardware). I try to test my own pages with pretty narrow windows
(certainly under 600) but I've given up trying to persuade anyone
else to design like that.

> > 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?

I dislike sites that have some nav on the left sidebar and other nav
along the top. I can never figure out how they relate: for what
sorts of things should I be looking on the left, and for what other
things should I look on the top? The bitkeeper page is only a mild
case of that, but some commercial and portal sites are really
confusing that way.

-- 
	...Akkana
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