SEUL: Re: [Freehive-list] SEUL and/or Linuxunited projects? (fwd)

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.04.9812022257380.13517-100000@primefactor.com>, 
 matt@primefactor.com writes:
>> > Leo requested earlier that we suggest projects that could use some help
>> > in web design. While our webpage at http://www.seul.org/ seems to get the
>
>	Just to add my two cents worth, I think the site needs to have
>more visual consistency.  Take your home page as compared to any of the
>other pages (except /dev/).  They look very different from one another.
>You should at least have a look on all of the pages that is somewhat
>derivative of the home page's look.

That's an interesting point. We used to have frames to solve this problem
(http://www.seul.org/index-old.html), but that didn't actually solve
anything. :)

>	Swapping the visited and nonvisited link colours wouldn't be a bad
>idea, either.  Red is a hot colour and is more likely to attract attention
>than the cool green.  You want the user's attention guided towards those
>pages that she hasn't visited as opposed to those that she has visited.
>Also, be consistent with your link colours.  They change to red and blue
>on some pages while they are red and brownish/yellow on others.

Actually, the html itself brings up a question: on MSIE, the break between
"SEUL" and "Simple End User Linux" at the top is lined up with the break
between the navigation part on the left and the text part on the right. In
most versions of netscape, it ends up not being lined up. Also, our colors
are showing up differently in different browsers (and I don't think this is
due entirely to overloaded color tables on the browser side). I'd love to
have somebody take a look at our index.html and say "Well, yeah, it's
broken because you're defining the colors inside the tables, and you're
not supposed to do that". I suspect it's something like that, in any case.

>	There is no navigation except on the home page.  I'd suggest
>adding basic navigation to every page.  At least have a link to the home
>page on every page.  Remember:  AltaVista doesn't index just home pages.  
>There's no telling where someone might enter your site. Make sure they can
>get around no matter where they enter.

What's an easy way to make this happen, without actually modifying all
the pages? Aside from that, where do you recommend I put the navigation
info (top, left side, etc), and how much of it should there be? I've been
slow to put that onto every page because I've wanted to give people only
the page they asked for, rather than the page plus a lot of other info. It
comes down to tradeoffs, I suppose.

>	I'd make the link to www.linux.org on the home page open in a new
>window.  The reason is that the link to it on the left side is in with the
>navigation of your site, therefore the user will expect that to be a link
>to information contained within your site.  Clicking on it will take
>people right out of your site when they might otherwise be wanting to
>explore yours.  I don't advocate doing this for the rest of the external
>links.  Only that one.

Good idea. I'll do that. I generally try to avoid being obnoxious to my
viewers (I count popping up a java thingie that they didn't ask for being
obnoxious, so I'd probably count making a new window as that too. Ah well.)
Do you think I should also do this for the links from our
http://www.seul.org/what/links.html page?

>	A unified look and feel is going to do more for your site now than
>anything.  People need to know where they are and have some means of
>getting to your home page and top level pages from anywhere in your site.

I've always figured they'd say to themselves "Huh. I'm sitting at the url
http://www.seul.org/foo/bar/baz. I bet if I go pull off the /foo/bar/baz,
then I'll probably get their home page." Am I assuming too much?

Thanks,
--Roger