[Freedombox-discuss] [FBox-Visual] New FBx Foundation Website Theme

[Sean O'Brien]

Let's see if we can get this rolling within a week; if there are only
minor criticisms at this point I think that's reasonable.

Links to the two (slightly different) themes so far:
http://mray.de/fbxfoundation_robert/theme.html
http://seandiggity.com/fbxfoundation/theme.html


Robert -

Here's a list of the current issues, and my thoughts on them:

* Change in background tile: I like the grittier "concrete" one better,
just didn't have the pattern to work with, so I went with the diagonal
tiles.

* Width of the main content: Is there a reason to shrink the design?
This is a very wordy website, likely to fill in with even more text.
We're already using a big font size and a lot of padding around the
content, so I think it's a bad idea.  For mobile views, we can start the
zoom at 100% and let users zoom in/out as desired.  Or we take a look at
the Bootstrap javascript/css and try to better integrate the
"responsive" stuff they've done so that the mobile view is different and
more compact horizontally, without having two separate themes (the view
wouldn't change based upon user-agent string, but the pixel size of the
viewport).

* Footer: Maybe I'm just partial but I think the one I came up with
looks nice, separates the footer from the main content well, and isn't
distracting.  The gray tones should go well with the "concrete"
background pattern too.

* favicon: Thanks for changing this; do you have a larger version so
that I can also change the "web clip" icons for iOS?

* Top navigation: Left-aligning this is fine.  Still not crazy about the
"sea green", but I don't have another color that doesn't make us look
like Twitter or Drupal.

* Bottom nav links: If we're going to be doing a left-aligned grid for
most content, these should be left-aligned too, and probably moved
closer to the footer than the main content.  Using the green here is
better than the blue in my design, but I'm not sold on the green
diagonal line.  Maybe just use the gray line.png from above?

* News links: We should be able to pull the date from ikiwiki and print
that out without any trouble.  We'd have to make sure the links were
sorted by date anyway.

* RSS and Atom links: Why not have them floating on the right of the
news links?  Makes that area of the screen look very busy if they're
floating left (i.e. in the center of the design).

* Language menu: Making a dropdown menu in the top-right isn't a big
deal, but I'd also say it's wise to keep the footer how it is
(especially because it shows the current state of the translations).

* Intro quote: Shortening it is fine, but making it too prominent on
every page is a bad idea.  I've written a short script before that goes
through a text file or a DB of quotes, stores them in a session array
and shuffles the array, then grabs one line of the array to print until
the array is empty.  If we do go with random short quotes, it's a good
approach because the user doesn't see the same quote twice until she has
seen them all during a browser session.

* Video: Clipping the video and hosting it on our site seems like the
best approach.  I'd be happy to clip a video, although working from a
low-quality version is probably not best.  We should also have a page
linking out to youtube, vimeo, etc. for the videos there (or perhaps our
own hosted versions).  If we're looking for a newer vid, can we get a
video of Bdale's keynote at FOSDEM?


The next step is just pasting the markup etc. into ikiwiki's templates
and making sure it works.  I can test locally, but pushing to the git
repo would change the actual site.  So, let's make any final changes to
these demos (the commentary above is probably my last contribution to
that), get it into ikiwiki, and do some testing.


James -

After Robert and I reach a consensus with the new theme, who should I
ask for the okay from before I push it?


Best,
~ Sean


On 04/02/2012 07:54 AM, Robert Martinez wrote:
> Since it is Monday now I post my actual progress.
> I'm not finished either so there are a couple of things (especially the
> footer) not working.
> All in all I kept close to my mockup:
> 
> http://mray.de/fbxfoundation_robert/robert_mockup01.jpg
> http://mray.de/fbxfoundation_robert/theme.html
> 
> http://mray.de/fbxfoundation_robert.tar.bz2
> 
> most drastic changes are:
> - the narrower page (but wider than the mockup)
> - old background (I just prefer the strong concrete to the light pattern
> now)
> - left-aligned menu.
> 
> I'll try to get the footer stuff fixed today, so how should we proceed
> after that?
> 
> 
> Robert