reworking our themes

[Phil Bull]

Hi Matt,

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 08:05 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> I'm hoping that by the release of intrepid we can manage to update our
> theme a bit for help.ubuntu.com, including the wiki.
> 
> I've made a start on the theming for the "official" documents by
> tweaking the xsl and css in our repository, and have come up with this
> - http://doc.ubuntu.com/~mdke/test/serverguide/C/index.html
> 
> Any comments? It uses the theme from http://start.ubuntu.com/8.04 - I
> don't know whether those colours are intended to be hardy specific, or
> whether they will change for the release of intrepid, so I'm copying
> in Matthew Nuzum as well for his comments. The alternative is to use a
> theme closer to that on http://www.ubuntu.com, although personally I
> have to say that I prefer the start.ubuntu.com theme.

Looks great! The only suggestion I have is to change the font to Verdana
or Arial for readability and aesthetic reasons [1].

> The "todo" items are to add the word "documentation" to the header
> logo, and to figure out how to arrange the tabs currently in use on
> help.ubuntu.com (or maybe abandon them for a different method/style of
> site navigation.

A more scalable navigation method would be to use a drop-down menu
(either a form element or a pretty JavaScript one). It could be
populated from an external JavaScript file, so we wouldn't have to
rebuild the whole site after each release. We could put other stuff in
there too, like "Ubuntu Server", "Mobile Edition" and "Kubuntu".

Also, would it be possible to drop a table of contents into a sidebar or
similar? This would make it much easier for users to find documentation.

> If people think it's worthwhile updating the themes for
> help.ubuntu.com, we can also make a start on upgrading the theme for
> the wiki to something similar

It's definitely worthwhile. The current theme is beginning to look a bit
dated.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] - http://www.webaim.org/techniques/fonts/#readability

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.launchpad.net/people/philbull