New website design

Mojca Miklavec mojca at macports.org
Tue Feb 5 20:31:22 UTC 2019


Dear fellow MacPorters,

I'm taking this topic to the mailing list since not everyone is
checking pull requests.

We received a pull request from our first-time contributor, see
    https://github.com/macports/macports-www/pull/13
Please leave your feedback there. If there are no objections, I would
like to see this merged, soon.

Our website design is in fact desperately outdated, it probably hasn't
changed since day one. (I believe the project started in 2002?)

We need a complete redesign; not just changing the colour palette, but
completely restructuring contents, decreasing the amount of
information, adding some pictures etc. That said, I'm fully in favour
of doing incremental improvements rather than waiting for the perfect
solution that we might never even start implementing.

Some points from a designer I talked to recently:
- We have waaaay to many items in the menu. We should shrink that to 4
items maximum, like "download", "documentation", "contribute", ...
- A small number of items could fit on top of the screen rather than
the side, and it would be much easier to create responsive design.
- Once we have a short list of most important items, create pictures.
It could be something like a "magnified screenshot" showing a few
lines of important commands, a download icon, ...
- ...

I also agree with the points raised in the PR: that it would be really
nice to have everything in some simple markup language (ideally
AsciiDoc to remain consistent), with an "edit me on github" icon in
the top right corner.

We don't need to do everything at once, but let's start the ball rolling ...

Mojca


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