Subject: Re: Alternate PostgreSQL.org Design

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:22:54 -0000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Omar Kilani
> Sent: 12 November 2004 02:38
> To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: [pgsql-www] Alternate PostgreSQL.org Design
> 
> Hi Again,
> 
> We would like to put forward an alternate design to the 
> current wwwdevel design.
> 
> It is available at: http://postgresql.tinysofa.com/
> 
> We believe that it is clean, professional and simple. And it 
> makes the release of 8.0 actually... exciting. :)

Yes, it is a very nice design, far nicer than your last one :-)

I am concerned though - after a long time looking around and discussing
things on and off, we already all agreed on a design. I'm concerned for
2 main reasons:

1) We accepted a concept from Lukasz - I don't like the idea of throwing
away his hard work in this way.

2) What happens if xyz web design comes and offers us another great
design next week. Do we start again? Where/when do we draw the line? If
I'm honest, based on our agreement to use Lukasz' design I think that
line should be drawn already.

> It is a *drop-in* replacement for the current pgweb design. 
> No additional work is required to retrofit the current 
> wwwdevel design. 
> It's already done!
> 
> It validates. It is designed for 800x600 and up. And it looks 
> pretty. :)

It does not expand with the browser though. That is a requirement of the
new site.

> By clicking "About", you can see the design for the section 
> navigation and the sponsor box.

Should be Overview, but I'll put that down to your using an old cvs
snapshot!

> We've gone through a bit of the current content and fixed it 
> up with proper headings and so forth. But we believe that the 
> content needs to be restructured to fit within navigational 
> guide lines.
> 
> Some issues with the current content of the site:

Yes, content and the current split of the sites is a known issue, and is
the next phase of the project.

Regards, Dave.

---

From: Robert Treat <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Nov 2004 10:07:49 -0500

please note I am dropping -advocacy from this discussion since I need
some focus on www work

> away his hard work in this way.

One problem I have with Lukasz design is that some of the subsection
really scream out for second level navigation. 

In Lukasz design, we end up re-propogating the right nav bar on every
page which I think is bad because it uses a lot of screen real estate
while adding little/no substance to the secondary pages. For example, do
we really need a link to external community sites on every page?  

In something like the "Overview" section, I would like to add in content
like case studies, gui tools, advantages, and other sections from
advocacy and techdocs websites, but this mean putting all of these
subsections on the main "overview" page, creating a long scrolling lists
that have to be gone through to find content. I think it is easier for
people to scroll short lists of subcategories in a left hand nav like in
the "About" section of the tinysofa design. 

These underlying structural issues need to be addressed regardless of
what design we use. 

> line should be drawn already.

If we agree that there are some underlying structural issues, then
either that needs to be addressed in the current design, or we need to
swap. I understand that we don't want to just toss Lukasz' work out the
window, but if we were developing an application and we found flaws in
some piece of it, and someone else coded up an alternative
implementation, I don't think we would discount the new idea simply on
the grounds that we already have an existing implementation. (In
fairness, the new design also has some structural issues, like fixed
width, that would also have to be addressed before we could use it) 

Robert Treat
-- 
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