Re: [www-redesign] status of http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

[Blackace]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:12 -0500, Curtis Napier wrote:
> I'm still working on the handbook menu, anybody have any ideas? I'm
> going to try the green arrows somehow or other unless someone can come
> up with something better.

I would suggest this is a good opportunity to figure out how the sub-nav
for specific sites like the forums and bugzilla will work out in
addition to sub-nav for the handbook and other handbook.xsl documents
(the dev handbook comes to mind)...my first suggestion along those lines
would be to place a sub-navigation bar under the main navigation but
above the ad bar, in other words where the five promo boxes are on the
main page, just collapsed in terms of height...this would also allow you
to keep the search interface around on other pages of the site...and you
could add a combo box to it for selecting what search to perform...this
and a unified interface on all gentoo sites with unified search result
pages will allow people to move from one site to the next, finding what
they need, quickly, efficiently, and intuitively.

> I made a major change to the content area. I did this to address the
> problem of "Dead Space" under the ad bar that several people have
> complained about and to help make the site degrade properly when fonts
> are increased or the window is small.
>
> Doing this caused a problem with block items overlapping the ads. This
> is because in order to get text to wrap under it (ad bar) I had to float
> it instead of absolutely positioning it. Items like: warning, important,
> note and codetables had to change the way the title is done from a div
> to a span to keep the background color from stretching across the page
> and overlapping the ads. The bottom part of them is now a <p> instead of
> a div for the same reason. The header will now only have a colored
> background directly under the text instead of a banner that goes across
> the page. Other than that it still looks the same.

I see the effects of this in the ad bar's padding, width, and in the
line-height of it's contents (which may just be noticeable relative to
the horizontal problems), and in how the main page scrolls horizontally
now.

I don't know if it's related or not, but the jump pads at the bottom now
have a large gap between the top image of each one and it's contents.

Another small thing that catches my eye is the title rows for the
newsitems, it needs some padding so the background color isn't crowding
the text...and it might look better if the date to the left of the title
had a background color, maybe a slightly different color, so the whole
newsitem is better defined from the others in place of the horizontal
rules that were removed (which don't get me wrong, looked worse, but the
newsitems are lacking definition now).

Another thing on the newsitems that comes to mind is how the author on
the left is exactly one row higher than the text on the right...I agree
there needs to be top-padding in the text row, but it seems it would be
ok for the text and the author to line up and share the same
top-padding.

> It's all coming together now thanks to the excellent feedback. Keep it
> coming people! :-)

Gladly, thank you for continuing on with the hard/real work of this
thing :)

-- 
Blackace
Gentoo Linux
Infrastructure Developer