[RFC] Home page refresh

[Martin Pool]

On 17 February 2010 22:13, Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
> To celebrate our 2.1 release, I'd like to make a small refresh to our
> home page. The current content (http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/) is
> looking a little too busy IMO.
>
> The goals of the refresh are:
>
> * Larger font for main text (and less of it)
> * Smaller vertical height (so I can see the footer links that I use
>  heavily without needing to scroll)
> * More space for NEWS.
>
> See http://people.canonical.com/~ianc/home-page-refresh/en/ for my
> proposed changes.
>
> Look OK?

Very nice.

The news is a bit cramped at the moment, but that may be better if we
start including a bit more text than just the headlines, which would
be good in itself.

We could lose the arrows next to the news items.  I think people have
the concept of hyperlinks by now. ;-)

I can see where you're going with the three screenshots, but they look
a bit noisy, partly because they're using slightly different and
jarring background shades.  I think also the text under it is
unnecessary: we say in "Get Bazaar" that it's cross-platform and it's
pretty obvious you can click a screenshot to see more.

The font is much nicer.

I think the three Gets are now likely to trail off the bottom of the
visible region in typical browser sizes; at least they did on mine and
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ suggests this may be generally
true.  Perhaps we should lose the icons underneath: they're a bit
visually dangling from the text, and they're not as visually
interesting as the screenshots or project icons.

>
> The next step is to introduce some scripting so that NEWS is included
> automatically from the RSS feed on Launchpad. Unless there are
> objections, I'd like to use the feed from the Bazaar project group
> (which includes all the plugins and associated add-ons), not just the
> core bzr project.

Now that really is exciting.  Once we have a bit of scripting we can
also pull in the current version etc automatically and then save some
labor.

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