[Actionchix] State of the new website

[Val Henson]

On 6/26/06, chris <lists at semioticpixels.com> wrote:
> 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.

Courses instructors?  I think most courses are now conducted only on
the mailing lists.  A date for first lesson would probably be
sufficient.

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

I think this is the wrong way to phrase the question.  What we both
want is the maximum amount of the page devoted to the actual content
of the page rather than associated decorations, navigations, logos,
etc.  So I would say make the viewport the size of the browser window
minus a minimal header, a teeny footer, and a small text-only
left-side navbar.

> 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.

Blue is nice.  We can suffer through the association with Fedora.

> > 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?).

The color is not pleasant, but what bothers me the most is the small
amount of the page which is used for content.

> > 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?

I don't understand the question.  I am only suggesting using the kind
of navigation bar on that page, I think the rest of it is a bit
overdecorated.  Does anyone have suggestions for what goes in the
header?  Some sort of LinuxChix text and logo?

-VAL