Re: When do we update the homepage to a modern design? - Extreme proposal No.1
So I think that we mostly agree (and this is kinda thing that goes in
circle for years) that Debian web presence needs a redesign. Current
Debian presence is huge and this affects us bad because - it is not
possible I think for anyone to pay attention to entire web presence, so
the text/docs will become sometimes old and inaccurate which doesn't
serve anyone. It also doesn't serve that we can't maintain such huge
piece of work. It also doesn't help that it is in CVS.
What it does help is that is usually just chunk of text and nothing more.
So one thing could be: hire some good known designer or designer team or
send a callout to community and see if anyone is good and willing from
it to work on Debian website design, explain them our values and what we
want from it, listen to their proposals (our values should stay but
maybe we should shift paradigm on how we present them - that is why I
think we need the re-design), lets pick most relevant part of web, copy
the text and re-write it (I would feed Russ Albery with books so he does
some ninja writing as the man has ways to trigger people into reading
all what he writes) to make it better and simpler but than add links to
wiki's or Debian handbook or other part of website, add some
infographics on pages (reuse all the time so the ecosystem is dozen of
pages, not thousands of them).
Basically we could have first page (debian.org) having simple but modern
layout that shows in infographic style that Debian is used in NASA, on
ISS, the space robot, most of web servers, have drop down or slide from
right/left menu for things like "Why Debian", "Download" (with simple
direct link to amd64 image and then "Not a 64-bit device? Find your
architecture"), "Contribute to Debian", "Debian Community" (make it
could go under Contribute to Debian), "DebConf" (lets link to out
cons!), "Debian Security" and then just all other pages simple text
(maybe occasionally some image) that has proper fonts and font sizes (so
we don't go blind on bigger screens).
And lets make it fun, lets talk to creator of xkcd so he gives us images
for our pages!
Btw, just add note - GNOME is the most popular DE out there but I am
sure many here hate it. And I am certain that if GNOME wasn't, it would
be KDE. It will never be MATE (though they do awesome work), LXDE,
xmonad, i3, awesome (no matter how awesome it is), ratpoison etc. Maybe
i3 is the best for our hackers, but Debian isn't OS for hackers - it is
universal OS for everyone - so at least we could pretend that we are
really trying to make it good for all and not only sysadmins, hackers or
(as joeyh wrote it) a "superstore" for derivatives.
Let the /bin/bash start!
Z
P.S. if you have non-constructive comment or you have the need to be
offensive, don't post it to the list, just send me personally the msg
and I promise you I will read it and I assure you, I will not care about
it at all.
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