[Haskell-cafe] Haskell.org re-design

[Christopher Done]

On 31 March 2010 12:01, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> - There are several news streams going on at once. Perhaps "Headlines"
> and "Events" could be merged into one stream. After watching the
> Hackage RSS feed every day I don't know if it's interesting enough to
> put on a front page. Perhaps in a side bar which brings me to my next
> suggestions.
>
> - Multi column pages are tricky to scan! It works well in news papers
> since the page height is limited but for web pages I really prefer one
> main column. Perhaps the second column code be made more narrow?
> Perhaps the footer content could be promoted into this second column
> and have it be a more conventional right (or left) hand nav?
>

That's true, it's a nice idea but in practice it's hard to know where
to focus. I've gone with a left nav. I've built up the HTML which is
cross-browser (ie6/7/8/opera/firefox/safari/chrome compat), still need
to add some bits but I can tomorrow import it into a wikimedia skin.
It's kind of easy to re-shuffle now that I've built it.

http://82.33.137.16/haskell-website/

Feedback would be appreciated.

One has to think, what do I really want to see on the home page?
Personally, I want to see latest events and news, that's what I look
for on the current page. I'd also like to stick The Big Download
Button on there and a small embedded TryHaskell, maybe with random
runnable code samples. Similar to the code sample on
http://ruby-lang.org/ but something you can actually try in the
browser.

And yes, by the way, I'm taking inspiration from Ruby's site, Python's
site and Ubuntu's wiki page, and I'd forgotten about Scala so I'm
looking at their site for ideas, too.

> - The quick links seem a bit random where they now appear. :)

Ha, yes! I popped them on last minute. I'm not entirely sure if there
is a standard place for social networking icons to go. I'll have to
see about that. There are lots of places the icons could go quite
neatly.

I was also thinking, I am told by my designer friends, that long pages
are coming back, so I think we could afford another couple sections on
there. Plus, I can optimise the page's download time by gzipping the
HTML and caching the gzip binary result, outputting that, and
refreshing that cache when the HomePage page is changed (actually
Wikimedia probably already supports caching somewhat, though it is an
old version, I'll have to see).

Cheers!