new FreeBSD-webpage

Marwan Burelle Marwan.Burelle at lri.fr
Fri Oct 7 05:20:42 PDT 2005


On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 10:21:44AM +0100, Miguel Saturnino wrote:
> > With Opera, about 40% of the screen space is left unused.
> > I *liked* the quick links the old one had on the sides.
> 
> If you try it with a screen resolution of 800x600 it will fill all the
> screen ;) A fluid design can be more usable in different screen
> resolutions, but when you want something prettier you need to restrain
> the horizontal width to get a consistent look across different screen
> resolutions. Almost every site (with fixed width) restrains the width to
> less than 800 pixels so that users with an 800x600 resolution don't need
> to scroll horizontally.

Sorry to disagree, but, fixed width and direct font size controlling,
isn't the good way to have a website looks good everywhere.

800x600 was the old "standard" resolution for PC under windows, and
windows desktop was thing for that size. But this isn't the cas
anymore, so what is the good size ? The answer won't be correct for
more than few years as it depends on price and most sold size of
monitor ...

So, using fixed width is bad, that's all. The only good way to made
web design is to add to your constraint the fact that the client will
never be the same, will never act the same way and every users may
have his own habits and taste. The best you can do is to make your
design with relative size against fixe size, font familly and not font
name and try to have something that can resist resizing (maybe under
some reasonable limits) whithout introducing unused space or
horizontal scrolling.

As I say earlier, using side bars (left, right or both) may solve some
problems. I agree to the fact the old site was a little bit heavy to
read the first time (I think I've never take the time to fully read
the first page ...) but there's a possible way for a "mix" of concept
...

Another point, is the fact that the outline generated by
validator.w3.org doesn't look good, it a sign of missuse of <hX> tags
or bad page's organisation (normaly, this will give a good idea of the
page organisation, and should look like a table of contents, if it's
not the case, then something is wrong ... )

> To me, the new site looks nicer than the old one, and I'm pretty sure
> most people (specially and more importantly new visitors) will find it
> more attractive than the old one!

At some point, I'd say yes, in fact after the natural surprise of
finding a web site you know have changed, I found it no so bad, but a
better look at it shows some week point (size, and lack of usefull
contents, or much more appropriate the fact that some unimportant
informations is far better visible than it realy needs, and some other
informations, like actual release, are "shadowed".)

This make me think that it was just a proposal for a new website
design, but not the new production site, until I realize I was on the
www.freebsd.org page !

-- 
Burelle Marwan,
Equipe Bases de Donnees - LRI
http://www.cduce.org
(burelle at lri.fr | Marwan.Burelle at ens.fr)
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