RFC: Home page design

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Emma Jane Hogbin writes:

 > It is critical that the front page meet the needs of the target
 > audience.

While I agree with your basic thrust, and this is your pidgen ....

I probably wouldn't know a target audience if it bit me, but my
observation of non-developers (ie my social science and mathematics
faculty colleagues -- VERY weird department -- and students alike) is
that the pages they mostly deal with are so busy and full of ads,
sidebars, totally irrelevant images and suchlike crap that they could
make a 2400x1800 window seem crowded.  As a consequence, they always
seem to be zoomed to full screen in their browsers.

Also, one of the most royal PITAs in recent memory while wearing my
developer hat was incessant complaints from users because a
full-screened XEmacs (editor) interacted badly with metacity (window
manager).  Details irrelevant, point is full-screened windows were
important to my (mostly software developer) users.

Is our target audience different?

 > Please also note that the CURRENT site also uses a fixed-pixel
 > width for the content.

"Fixed-pixel"?  I don't know much about CSS etc, but isn't it possible
to use fixed "em" widths?  Fixed pixel widths usually seem to break
badly in both Safari and Firefox if I mess with the font sizes (and I
do that a fair amount recently ... eyes gettin' old ...).