[Adium-devl] Website design

[Stephen Holt]

I agree with using analytics before we make any final decisions (though, it
won't resolve the fluid/fixed debate)

And a couple of points:

1) Purpose
At this point, most people know what Adium is.  If they don't know what
Adium is, they should at least be familiar with the concept of instant
messaging (if not, why are they here at all?).

The purpose should be to give a quick and accurate discription of what Adium
does, and direct them to the download link as easily as possible.  The
current page achieves this very, very well.

Any additional information (documentation, support, etc.) should be linked
to from the main page.  We already do this well, but
http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/HomepageRe-design has a good parsing out of how
this could be improved.

2) Process
You *DO NOT* design a site by arguing over design elements before you even
know what you want the site to do.  Talk about what the site is currently
doing, what it's not doing that it needs to do, and what it could be doing
better.

We need to know the goal for a redesign.  Is it to increase downloads?
Solidify our "brand" (in as much as we have one)? To increase community
involvement?  All of those?  Something else entirely?  Nothing at all?

Once we've figured out how the current site is deficient, then we can start
talking about what kind of design changes need to be made to it.  Discussing
screen resolutions, fixed/fluid design, or anything else like that is
potentially wasted effort.

Just my 2¢, of course... but I just want to be sure we know what we're doing
before we go about changing something our users are used to.

-- Steve Holt

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Christopher Forsythe <chris at growl.info>wrote:

> Even if you weren't doing a redesign, I'd suggest putting on some kind of
> analytics. It helped a lot on some sites I've worked on to determine where
> bad pages were.
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net> wrote:
>
>> This entire thread about fixed width layouts is revealing of why design by
>> comittee sucks balls.
>>
>> Suggestions: let's put Google Analytics on our site, and after we have 2
>> weeks of data, let's come back to this. That way we have *some* data.
>>
>> Any opposed? If I hear no objections I'll do this in the next couple of
>> days.
>>
>> -Colin
>>
>>
>> On Oct 1, 2008, at 9:47 AM, Peter Hosey <boredzo at adiumx.com> wrote:
>>
>>  On Oct 01, 2008, at 09:37:39, Andrew Harvey wrote:
>>>
>>>> Do you honestly have problems with the widths of those sites I listed?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I don't frequent any of them. Two of them (Technorati and DF) are on RSS;
>>> the other two, I hardly visit at all.
>>>
>>> DF is a little bit slim for my taste, but this is mitigated by the fact
>>> that I keep a fairly small browser window. If I kept a larger browser
>>> window, it would bug me.
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
>
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