RFC: Home page design

[Ian Clatworthy]

Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 September 2009 10:57:00 am you wrote:
>> Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:

> This is useful for people with adaptive/assisting devices such as screen 
> readers as the links will be read out and they can jump to the right place in 
> the page immediately. The region should also flash/display for those people 
> using hand held devices (and regular browsers) when they tab through the links 

Neat.

> I didn't merge your full branch, just the one with the footer changes (r29, 
> IIRC). Generally it's good to make each commit *very* small. At this point 
> there's three-ish changes in your commit that removes accessibility links:  
> remove access links, update "about" description, and move the news link. I'll 
> have to deal with them all separately and probably won't end up merging any of 
> the rest of the branch as-is.

I certainly wasn't worrying or thinking about accessibility as I made
the edits sorry. By all means, merge whatever makes sense.

Some background to explain the changes I made in case it helps ...

1. Footer links.

My edits were certainly based on what you have on your wiki page. The
big change is focussing on *Extras*, not *Plugins* as one of the
categories/columns. Many extras/add-ons/extensions aren't plugins to
Bazaar per se but are really important to potential adopters, e.g. IDE
integrations. If anything, maybe we need to add 'Project hosting' into
that Extras column (and remove the Plugins Guide to keep the link count
at 5).

I also reordered the documentation sub links so they were in likelihood
of someone reading them: quick reference, bzr in 5 minutes, User Guide,
etc. Feel free to change that if you think that's not a good idea.

So please keep/improve the Extras column but otherwise hack away.

2. Executive summary (DVCS that just works).

IMO, this needs to contain (just) enough information for a reader to say
"yes, Bazaar is definitely worth investigating further". So I added in
some of our unique differentiators: central + distributed, transparent
tracking of foreign branches, proper rename handling. I took out stuff
that is now elsewhere on the home page, i.e. who uses Bazaar (in images)
and GNU project (in footer).

3. Moving of News into banner.

This is probably the most controversial change. Basically, (2) makes
that column longer than the other 3 so moving news into the banner was
an experiment to see how it would look. Poolie wants more than just a
date and release # though. 2-3 short phrases highlighting features of
the latest release *may* fit in the banner but may not. We both want to
make it simple/automatic to update the home page on a new release so my
plan of just a date & release name in the news headlines is as simple as
it gets. No need to grammar check that. :-)

Keep up the great work and I hope the above helps,
Ian C.