RFC: Home page design

[Martin Pool]

Separately from the design feedback, which is very welcome to
continue, I'd like to look at how we can get this   deployed in time
for a 2.0 release.  It would be nice if we could at least have it
ready to cut over in by say Wednesday next week.

The steps, to me, seem to be:

 * putting the web source into a group-owned branch on Launchpad, in a
bzr-website project, so there is a single definitive source
 * pulling that onto our server, maybe under /new/
 * working out and setting up whatever redirections may be wanted to
or from the existing wiki
 * anything else?

I have some wishes based on Ian's current branch (at
http://people.canonical.com/~ianc/dancingmonkeys/), but they're not
all strictly necessary before we deploy:

 * The icons overlap with the text above them and the highlighting of
them with a big rectangle looks very shoddy.  We must fix this, I
suggest by moving them above the text, and either showing a specific
hover icon, or having no hover indication.

 * I think the news is now a bit too subtle, but we could add a
sentence or two about the changes.

 * The hover region for the top navigation doesn't correspond to the
clickable region.

 * The relative font sizes vary too much, and the body text should be
in the user's preferred size.   (I think Emma said she's already doing
this.)

2009/9/16 Michael Gliwinski <Michael.Gliwinski at henderson-group.com>:
> On Tuesday 15 September 2009 15:22:32 Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
>> > > 6. nicer screenshot in the carousel area (thanks Gary!)
>> >
>> > Which made the banner section even huger than the too-huge it
>> > already was.  I know that particular banner is only for the home
>> > page, but still, I find it most excessive.
>>
>> Please read: http://bazaar-vcs.org/BazaarPersonas
>> The screen shots must be big enough to be "readable" by our target market.
>> Currently the image is 247 pixels. This is not excessively large given its
>> job of convincing people that Bazaar has a "usable" GUI suitable for
>> non-technical people. Chances are good that if you're subscribed to this
>> list, you're not the target market for that image. :)
>
> Corect me if I'm wrong but from that page I can see most of the target
> audience are actually technical people?  Will non-technical people really be
> shopping for a VCS system for themselves?  I'd imagine they will have it
> selected for them by someone more knowledgeable on the subject.

We get a lot of decision-makers or influencers saying "I'm ok with the
command line myself, but my project can only adopt it if it has a
reasonable gui", so we want to show them that it does.

> Also, I don't recall that subscribing to this list changed me noticeably ;)
> Before subscribing to the list I had the same dislike for huge banners.  I'm
> sure it will also be the case for some newcomers.  How is being subscribed to
> the list relevant?
>
> In any case, let's assume some people coming to the front page will care if
> Bazaar has a GUI and like you said you want to show them screenshots.  My
> question is, does it really have to be in the banner?  Or do they have to be
> so large in the banner?  Couldn't it be done so that the screenshot or even
> entire banner expands when hovered/clicked?

I think we can rearrange this so that there's less empty space in the
left hand side, for example by putting some more news in there.

> At the moment, this combined with fixed width makes this page really hard to
> navigate from handhelds for example.  For reference see attached screenshot
> of how it looks like on maemo browser on N810.

Having the site work well on handhelds is important because they are
so common and people do use them for general "I wonder how bzr's
going" type browsing.  On the other hand, interesting handhelds
generally cope ok with sites that assume a larger screen, because so
many sites still do (eg nytimes.com.)

I think ultimately to work really well on a handheld you need an
entirely different layout (like http://m.guardian.co.uk/ or
iphone.facebook.com) that has just one column: this works very well on
a 3 inch screen and poorly on even a laptop screen.  That can be done
either by having totally different site source, or clever css (maybe?)
or by the mobile browser.  Therefore I think it doesn't make sense to
criticize the desktop-oriented site layout on the grounds that it will
do poorly on handhelds, because no _layout_ (as opposed to codebase)
will work well in both cases.

I do think it's worth making sure the default layout is at least
readable on handhelds and that we eventually do something nice there.

I just tested it in the Android (webkit) browser and it looks good,
though quite wide.   For some reason there is a screenful of
whitespace below the bottom of the screen.

It also looks good in Opera Mini for Android: the page is wide, but
usable.  The fonts are actually better, perhaps because Opera is
fixing the bug of extreme sizes. :-)   The get-* buttons are a bit
visually damaged but I think we should fix that anyhow.  In Opera's
mobile view, where it reflows things into one column, it looks
_superb_: just one column, just a reasonable amount of text for a
mobile device, the screenshot is legible but not too big, and the
footer navigation is useful.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>