Thread: Revamp'd Web Site...
I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am
looking for feedback.
Bsically, I was growing tired of looking at the site, and
constantly reloading the same data over and over again (the 'index' on the
left, for starters).
I think the new format looks okay, and believe I've covered over
any 'errors' that would creep in, but if anyone finds any, please let me
know?
The mirrors won't see it until tonight, but if you want to go look
at it now, check out:
http://www.postgresql.org/index.html
On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, The Hermit Hacker wrote: > > I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am > looking for feedback. > > Bsically, I was growing tired of looking at the site, and > constantly reloading the same data over and over again (the 'index' on the > left, for starters). > > I think the new format looks okay, and believe I've covered over > any 'errors' that would creep in, but if anyone finds any, please let me > know? > > The mirrors won't see it until tonight, but if you want to go look > at it now, check out: > > http://www.postgresql.org/index.html Can you also clean up the announce mailinglist? Over 50% of the messages are SPAM! Unless you do something about it I have no option but to declare hub.org a unsafe domain and deny any SMTP traffic origination from it. Hugo. +------------------------+------------------------------+ | Hugo van der Kooij | Hugo.van.der.Kooij@caiw.nl | | Oranje Nassaustraat 16 | http://www.caiw.nl/~hvdkooij | | 3155 VJ Maasland | (De man met de rode hoed) | +------------------------+------------------------------+ "Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." (Mitch Radcliffe)
hi! Did you rename start page of PostgreSQL site from index.shtml to index.html by an accident or with some special purpose? It is very important to maintainers of mirrors,'cause we used to begin mirroring from www.postgresql.org/index.shtml -- URL www.postgresql.org automatically throws to your nearest mirror ! Al. On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, The Hermit Hacker wrote: > > I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am > looking for feedback. > > Bsically, I was growing tired of looking at the site, and > constantly reloading the same data over and over again (the 'index' on the > left, for starters). > > I think the new format looks okay, and believe I've covered over > any 'errors' that would creep in, but if anyone finds any, please let me > know? > > The mirrors won't see it until tonight, but if you want to go look > at it now, check out: > > http://www.postgresql.org/index.html > > >
The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> writes:
> I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am
> looking for feedback.
Here's mine: frames suck.
The front page now comes up completely blank in a non-frames-savvy
browser. That's unfriendly; you should at least have a NOFRAMES section.
More generally, though, frames lose for any number of reasons:
you can't bookmark a frameset, the "back" button typically doesn't
behave intuitively, etc. etc. For example, I had a link on my
personal home pages to the "search PostgreSQL mailing lists" page,
because I used that quite a lot. It doesn't work right anymore,
or at least doesn't bring me to the same display I get by going
through the "front door".
The old design seemed to be trying to emulate the look of a framed site
without actually using frames, which was not really such a bad thing.
The site *worked* quite well, except for some extra download time.
I think the new setup is less usable.
I'm not volunteering to redesign it again however :-(. I'm not
a competent web designer.
regards, tom lane
On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Aleksey Dashevsky wrote:
> hi!
> Did you rename start page of PostgreSQL site from index.shtml to
> index.html by an accident or with some special purpose?
> It is very important to maintainers of mirrors,'cause we used to begin
> mirroring from www.postgresql.org/index.shtml -- URL www.postgresql.org
> automatically throws to your nearest mirror !
Ack...I had figured that most mirror sites were using either the
'mirror' package, or, now, rsync :(
Yes, I changed it to index.html on purpose...with .shtml, every
time a person hits a page wiht that extension, your server has to
"process" the file for any SSI directives. This causes extra load on your
machine(s), which at least one mirror site showed concern about :(
>
> Al.
> On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>
> >
> > I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am
> > looking for feedback.
> >
> > Bsically, I was growing tired of looking at the site, and
> > constantly reloading the same data over and over again (the 'index' on the
> > left, for starters).
> >
> > I think the new format looks okay, and believe I've covered over
> > any 'errors' that would creep in, but if anyone finds any, please let me
> > know?
> >
> > The mirrors won't see it until tonight, but if you want to go look
> > at it now, check out:
> >
> > http://www.postgresql.org/index.html
> >
> >
> >
>
Having spent about one year on revamping my own site, I am very
appreciative of the efforts you made. However, I would suggest ditching
frames if at all possible.
If for no other reason than that frames make it virtually impossible for
search egines to comprehesively index your site. The search engines will
now see only the frameset page and whatever keywords you put there.
search engines like excite ignore keywords entirely because lamers started
spamming the keywords tag. so search engines like excite won't turn up
any relebvant info on postgres from your site. bad for publicity.
secondary reasons to ditch frames are the navigation difficulties they
present (back button backs out of only the frame which has current focus
and that scrollbars eat up valuable real estate on a browser window; not
lynx friendly etc etc.
i recently learned a design trick from a friend who is a real pro at this
stuff (www.peterme.com) and I am working on version three of my site that
will incorporate this
global navigation starts top left and moves across from lef tto right
local naviagation starts top left and moves top to bottom
so if you have a hierarchical site such as:
index.html
friends
mike.html
joe.html
foes
jack.html
john.html
....
and so forth,
the home page would offer
HOME FRIENDS FOES
across the top.
When you got to the FRIENDS section, you'd have
HOME FIRNEDS FOES across the top and
MIKE
JOE
going down the side.
This works very well and is aform well understood and liked by many
people. so the idea is to create table templates
that has at least two rows and two columns laid out as follows:
----------------------------
| global nav buttons/links |
----------------------------
| l | |
| o | Content goes here |
| c | |
| a | |
| l | |
| | |
| n | |
| a | |
| v | |
----------------------------
at that point, you just have to decide whether you wnat to use the table
percent feature to control the width of tables or the pixel definitions.
since NS doesn't render tables correctly, it is better to choose the pixel
definition, and based on large generalities, allowing a table to be 612
pixels wide will allow it to fit nicely in most users screens, and some
users with big screens and/or high pixel denisty will see only part of
their browser window filled with content.
just my two cents,
steve doliov
On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Steve Doliov wrote:
> secondary reasons to ditch frames are the navigation difficulties they
> present (back button backs out of only the frame which has current focus
> and that scrollbars eat up valuable real estate on a browser window; not
> lynx friendly etc etc.
I'm lost as to what you mean about the back button...if I hit
'back' on my browser (Netscape under Win95), it goes to the last frame I
viewed, regardless of how many different frames I viewed, which is the
same as before...
The scroll bar had always been there, and, except on the smaller
resolutions, there is no more or less real estate being taken up...
As for lynx friendly...I've viewed the currently layout under
Lynx, and it appears fine to me *shrug*, but I'm also running a relatively
new version of it (2.8.x)...but, the old uses tables in many places which
also don't look good or come up under older Lynx's...
> i recently learned a design trick from a friend who is a real pro at this
> stuff (www.peterme.com) and I am working on version three of my site that
> will incorporate this
Looked at his site, and its not quite the same effect that we're
trying to accomplish. For starters, I find it very slow to load, and I'm
running on a T1 right now, and, for two, under Lynx, it doesn't look any
better then, it not worse then, what I've currently got up.
The one thing I like about what is up there now s that you can go
to the 'frame-list' under Lynx, and get a listing of the pages available,
without cluttering up the screen...the old PostgreSQL site didn't provide
that ...
On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Tom Lane wrote:
> The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> writes:
> > I just did a relatively major cleanup of the WWW site, and am
> > looking for feedback.
>
> Here's mine: frames suck.
>
> The front page now comes up completely blank in a non-frames-savvy
> browser. That's unfriendly; you should at least have a NOFRAMES section.
What browser are you running? IE and Netscape both support
Frames, as does Lynx, to a certain extent...
> More generally, though, frames lose for any number of reasons:
> you can't bookmark a frameset,
Have to agree with this one...
> the "back" button typically doesn't
> behave intuitively,
Can't agree here...the 'back' button, at least for me, does
exactly the same thing for me here as it did with the old site. Goes back
to the previous page (or frame) that I saw before...as does the forward to
the next one...
> The old design seemed to be trying to emulate the look of a framed site
> without actually using frames, which was not really such a bad thing.
> The site *worked* quite well, except for some extra download time.
> I think the new setup is less usable.
I didn't like the old design for exactly that reason...Basically,
I think that its more attractive to have an index bar that doesn't get
reloaded each and every time, just the text that changes.
At 21:55 +0300 on 22/7/98, The Hermit Hacker wrote: > I think the new format looks okay, and believe I've covered over > any 'errors' that would creep in, but if anyone finds any, please let me > know? Did you purposefully want the background colors to be as the user's browser wants them? That is, you haven't defined any background (neither image nor color), so most Netscape users will see either White (on Windows) or gray (on all other machines), or in my case, pale blue (as that is my default color). It is usually preferable to set the site's background in the BODY tag of each of the pages, so as to have everybody see the same combination of colors. As far as I recall, the site used to have a white background. On another matter, which I wrote to you before on the private channel. Perhaps you filter out my mails? I hope not: The mini-faq which is published every week in the General mailing list is outdated, and contains names and descriptions of mailing lists which no longer exist, and doesn't contain the ones that do. A mini-faq is suppose to help, not to mislead, so I advise fixing it. Herouth -- Herouth Maoz, Internet developer. Open University of Israel - Telem project http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma
At 20:35 +0300 on 23/7/98, Steve Doliov wrote: > Having spent about one year on revamping my own site, I am very > appreciative of the efforts you made. However, I would suggest ditching > frames if at all possible. > > If for no other reason than that frames make it virtually impossible for > search egines to comprehesively index your site. The search engines will > now see only the frameset page and whatever keywords you put there. > search engines like excite ignore keywords entirely because lamers started > spamming the keywords tag. so search engines like excite won't turn up > any relebvant info on postgres from your site. bad for publicity. My own opinion in this issue: I belong to the pro-frames people. I maintain a site which is frames-based. I know there is great objection to frames, but I agree with Marc that you lose almost the same amount of realestate, have to load the same data over and over, and you have to scroll your entire page when you look for something in the navigation bar, when you don't use frames. But I have a few points to make. * The "back" button's behavior is, in fact, intuitive for most users. In the begining, Netscape had the "back" return from the entire frame set and that was very frustrating when all you wanted to do was back up one operation. They changed this in following navigator versions. Mostly because MSIE drew better reactions... * You _can_ bookmark a frameset as well as a frame. If you focus on one frame, you'll bookmark that specific frame. If you are not focused on any of the frames, you'll bookmark the whole thing. In order to revoke focus from all frames, simply click in the "Location" field. * Although it is tempting, Marc, I strongly advise that you lose the bottom frame. Remember that evetually, your pages *will* be searched and encountered from outside the frames. Therefore you really should have your copyright notice at the bottom of *each page*. And - very important - have a link back to the home page, which will give the frustrated user the context in which to view the page and get more information. There are utilities which automate the process for you without resorting to server-side includes and their overhead. After all, this is a batch operation - stamp all the pages with the same info, and their own modification dates included as "last modified on". You can probably write a perl script to do this very quickly - but there *are* tools (at least for the Mac and Windows) which already have this sort of thing. * In order to make life easier on lynx users, older browser users (there are still people using Netscape 1 today!), and search engines which don't know how to interpret FRAME tags, you should have a NOFRAMES section, with links to all the pages and sub pages in your site. * Lose the frame borders. Distinguish the frame from the body by background color. Saves realestate, and very few people bother to resize frames anyway. If you want to see an example of all these advices in real life, you can take a look at my site. It has nothing to do with Postgres, it's just a hobby. Take a look at it with both Netscape and lynx: http://www.maccabi.co.il/ - sorry for the self-promotion, but I have no other example readily available. Herouth -- Herouth Maoz, Internet developer. Open University of Israel - Telem project http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma
> * In order to make life easier on lynx users, older browser users > (there are still people using Netscape 1 today!), and search engines > which don't know how to interpret FRAME tags, you should have a > NOFRAMES section, with links to all the pages and sub pages in your > site. VERY IMPORTANT.. I know personally, when searching Online docs, I use Lynx extensively... -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Michael - System Administrator Working in Cheap Canadian Dollars Unix Administration - WebSite Hosting - Network Services - Programming Wizard Internet Services - TechnoWizard Computers - Wizard Tower TechnoServices ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (604) 589-0037 Beautiful British Columbia, Canada ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On Sun, 26 Jul 1998, The Web Administrator wrote:
> > * In order to make life easier on lynx users, older browser users
> > (there are still people using Netscape 1 today!), and search engines
> > which don't know how to interpret FRAME tags, you should have a
> > NOFRAMES section, with links to all the pages and sub pages in your
> > site.
>
> VERY IMPORTANT.. I know personally, when searching Online docs, I use Lynx
> extensively...
Newer versions of Lynx support frames...I know, I test with Lynx
:)
Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org