new website - or "jet lag is good"

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Sun Oct 11 06:40:52 PDT 2015


Ahh,

Clearly it's much easier to get feedback on the website than to get people to test :-)

Is this an example of the bike shedding phenomenon? :-)

I'll try to answer to all of the comments here...

> On Oct 10, 2015, at 11:20 PM, Rick Walsh <rickmwalsh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had a quick look on my phone. Using Chrome on my Galaxy S6.  I like the new layout, including that it draws attention to cool features at the top. A few points.
> -Main headings on each page are inconsistent size. Landing page is small. Downloads is large. FAQ is small, etc.
> 

Yes, I noticed that, too. The pages are two different ways - Landing and FAQ use an additional toolset that the other pages don't use. I'll take a look at how to make this consistent.
> -I think the heading colour would look better as "Subsurface blue", rather than black.
> 

Good point
> -How will the page look on old/text browsers? Not sure this really matters for a solely desktop/smartphone program.
> 

A picture says more than a thousand words, doesn't it?

So yes, this is designed to be assistive technology friendly. All the text should render reasonably on a screen reader and on a text browser.
> -On the landing page is it better to elaborate on the features in case the reader doesn't wait to scroll through them at the top? Cloud storage, platforms and the planner aren't mentioned except in the bit that flashes through at the top.
> 

I tried both ways and it felt really redundant. So I'm not sure what to do here. I'll ask a friend of mine who has helped me with rewording this page (and as working on writing a better announcement). She tends to know what works with audiences :-)

> On Oct 10, 2015, at 11:22 PM, Salvador Cuñat <salvador.cunat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Good morning.
> 
> 2015-10-11 8:01 GMT+02:00 Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org <mailto:dirk at hohndel.org>>:
> After about 20 hours of editing and copying and modifying I have a mockup of the new website ready.
> 
> Please go to http://ssrftest.subsurface-divelog.org <http://ssrftest.subsurface-divelog.org/> and let me know what you think.
> 
> 
> It looks rather bizarre in my browser  };-)


Yes, I kinda mentioned that but should have said it more strongly...
a) the site automatically follows the language settings of your browser - so if you usually browse the web in Spanish (or German) it will show you that translation (which hopefully means less need for the language switching)
b) while I spent a ton of time migrating a good chunk of the translations, the landing page and the dive ramblings page and most of the posts are broken with respect to translations
But many other pages should do the right thing, e.g. the FAQ or the Downloads page (except that I believe I have some changed to the non-existend 4.5 and some are the old text). Which reminds me, I noticed that the translations are WAY out of sync for some of the pages. As everything else we do, this is all a matter of the right people having enough time. Where the "right people" way to often ends up being "me".

> On Oct 10, 2015, at 11:34 PM, Steve <stevewilliams at internode.on.net> wrote:
>  
> Looks good on my laptop.
> I would change the different languages bar to the top rather than at the bottom which you need to scroll down before you see it from the homepage.


Well, it's at the bottom on purpose because as I mentioned above, most people should never need it and having it on the top means it steals important vertical space when you first open the page. So I think I'll leave it on the bottom.


> On Oct 10, 2015, at 11:55 PM, Davide DB <dbdavide at gmail.com> wrote:
> Did you changed/updated the cms you used for the website?
> While translating Italian pages I remember it was a pita. I had to insert html escape chars by myself. 
> 


No, the CMS is the same - it's still Wordpress. I spent some of the oodles of money that I am making with Subsurface on a much better translation infrastructure that hopefully will make the lifes of the translators easier - but that caused me significant pain in the migration (but then again, the old plugin that I used was the third one in a succession of free plugins that each eventually got abandoned, including my last choice, so I decided to go with a commercial plugin that I have an annual subscription for and that comes with actual support.


Along the same lines I also switched to a commercial theme that hopefully will make my work much easier. Oh, did I mention that that's an annual subscription as well? The run-rate of running this "free" software project at this point between the domains, hosting, certificates, themes, plugins and whatnot is approaching $2k - yeah, I guess it's just free for the users...

> On Oct 11, 2015, at 1:02 AM, Gaetan Bisson <bisson at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> The only thing I noted is that we have two redundant social media
> banners (one in "top-header" and the other in "footer-bottom"); perhaps
> the top one could be removed so page contents get bumped up?


Oh, good catch - I thought I had disabled the top one (see comments above about not wasting vertical space at the top). Yes, I just want the ones in the footer.

> On Oct 11, 2015, at 2:18 AM, Joakim Bygdell <j.bygdell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
> Adding a few thing to what the others have said.
> 
> The lefthand navigation frame goes all the way to the bottom of the page and thus covers the language row with the result that only “sh” from English is visible.
> It is really apparent on the bugtracker page.

Oh, oops - that one is supposed to "flow", i.e. to wrap around and become multiple lines. I need to figure out why it doesn't do that

> I suggest that the command snippets get placed in a scrollable frame, 
> otherwise the page gets disproportionally wide when viewed on a phone

Also a very good idea. I need to figure out how to do that - can't be that hard since I see it on many pages.


OK, I think that responds to all of your comments.

Thanks everyone for trying things - I realize it's still a little rough but I'll admit that I'm quite excited about it. Needless to say I think this is a massive improvement compared to what we had before - which looked terrible on mobile browsers and was way too cluttered. We had a couple people look at the site while in Bonaire and the responses were generally quite negative. The reality is that a lot of people consume the web on iPads and not on desktops and that changes some of the underlying ideas of what you can show and how you should show it. Less visual clutter is the main goal here...

/D
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