www/86970: The new web site look and feel is not FreeBSDish as we all know and love

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-10-06 19:43, George Danchev <danchev at spnet.net> wrote:
>On Thursday 06 October 2005 17:01, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> only stating the fact that these are *YOUR* opinions, which you have
>> *every* right to have but it should probably take a lot more than
>>
>> 			``This sucks, fix it''
>
> This is not what I said!
>
>> to get anything done :)

Well, it was an over-simplification on my part, but the bulk of your
post seemed to be of that tone.  Sorry if that wasn'r really your
intention...

> It has already been said that the important links should stay on the
> main page, not forcing people digging hard for stuff. Look at the old
> site's left pane for example. These are the bullet lists links for
> Platforms, Software, Documentation, Support, Bug Reports, Development
> (at least) along with their submenus as links. Just one-click away -
> clean, sane and simple.

That's more like it!  Suggestions for improvement are a nice thing.
This is, in fact, how the web site *IS* developed :)

Well, a long list of 2-level links may be nice if you are a 'hacker'
type, who likes quickly skiiming through lists of links for the right
one.  It's so... early 90's for the rest of the world though.

> Also my personal opinion is that the new site should have been placed
> at freebsd.org/new and discussed to death before surprising people
> unexpectedly, while the old one mentions about the prospective change
> and link to how it would look at "Project News" (old's right pane) not
> the other way around like to place the production one at old/ and
> fixing new site bugs on the fly.

There comes a point at the life of every project where things are no
longer done the right way because it *is* the Right Way(TM), but only
because ``this is what we have been doing for so long now''.  At times
like these, more discussion doesn't usually help at all :)

Nevertheless, this sort of discussion (about the web site needing a
face-lift) has been done again and again, and then again, and again a
few months later.  The mailing list archives contain a few nice
monster-threads about it.

Nobody who has been subscribed to freebsd-doc and freebsd-www has been
'surprised unexpectedly'.

Moreover, more discussion wasn't going to help much at the point, until
someone went away and really *DID* the face lift.  And they did...
Thankfully they did :)