Website update

[Máirí­n Duffy]

Hi Ricky,

Ricky Zhou wrote:
> Here's my version with very clean HTML/CSS:
> http://fedora.riczho.dyndns.org/static/ (previous version is now at
> http://fedora.riczho.dyndns.org/static.old/).

I'm not quite sure I agree with all of the visual changes here.
> 
> File sizes:
> 2445    index.html
> 2217    style.css
> 17947   images/
> 22609   total
> 
> Some concerns/changes that I've made:
> 
> I've lowered the width of the page to only 80%, as (for me) this line
> width is easier to read.  For similar reasons, I've changed the text
> color from gray to black.

I wanted the middle area to take up as much width as possible because I 
would like this template at some point to maybe be usable for the wiki. 
The wiki needs a great amount of horizontal space. I also wanted to 
leave the option open for a right-side banner/control bar.

The text color was changed to grey to give a slightly less-jarring, 
lower contrast between the white background which is supposed to me more 
readable and I think looks a little slicker.

The text style has been made much smaller which makes it more difficult 
to read, and the spacing is off so some of the elements on the page feel 
like they don't have enough breathing space.
> 
> With the sidebar, I'm somewhat concerned with putting the image banner
> there, as it forces me to set the sidebar width in pixels (I'd much
> rather use a relative unit that can scale more easily).  

The image banner is not scalable, it would not look as good if it was, 
and honestly scaling a banner like that is not useful; it doesn't add 
any value if it's wider because you'd just be adding empty spcae, not 
content if you expanded it.

It's better to scale the main content, the text on the page, to be wider 
to make it easier to read on widescreen monitors.

> Also, I'm a bit
> wary of using the -moz-border-radius property for obvious browser
> support issues (and with non-gecko browsers, the hard edges *really*
> stick out).

The moz border radius is extremely light though, requires less hacky 
html, and takes up no space in images.
> 
> For the background, I felt that the original shadows seemed a bit too
> "3D," and kind of pop out instead of blending with the page.  Also, from
> a CSS angle, it'd take either extra markup, doing something weird with
> the HTML or body elements, or setting a pixel width on the entire page
> to implement such shadows, so I just used a solid border.

I just have one extra div container on the body to implement it. I like 
the shadows being very thin, the content area takes the stage more then, 
there's more space to work with in the main content area, and I think 
the shadows are a nice element. I wanted them to make the content area 
pop out more. It's a style that is popular on a lot of websites these days.
> 
> Now, my largest issue is probably with non-home pages.  Since the left
> column needs to be so wide, we lose a *lot* of space under the nav as
> the text gets longer.  Will we be having a separate design/layout for
> the home page?

This is a pretty standard web page layout style. The space underneath 
the navigation bar can eventually be used for banners and little info 
feeds (eg you could have a little widget that displays the latest few 
Fedora News items, etc.)

The width of the banner and navigation bar looks too wide in your page 
layout because the main content area only takes up 80%. There's 20% 
wasted space + the wasted space under the navigation you're referring to.
> 
> Other random questions:
>  * Will the "Get Fedora" page still have the banner/"get it now" links?
>  * Does anybody feel that the navigation is in a somewhat awkward place?

The links on that page then point to the anchors for the specific things 
(eg clicking on bittorrent brings up the bittorrent anchor on the page.)

~m