[vos-d] thinking about a new web site

[Reed Hedges]

Here are some ideas I had on revamping the web site.

Graphic Design
--------------

* Change the background to white or another light color. Maybe change 
the main content area to a different shade too, rather than current grey.

* A set of background/side illustrations, that convey some of the more 
general themes of VOS and Interreality -- interconected things; 
multifaceted stuff; distributed structures -- but also look cool and 
have a "computer graphics" style to them.

Pages
-----

It's great that the site runs on hypervos. Maybe we want to keep it, or 
maybe we want to switch to something else then go back to it.  It would 
be great to have text in Vobjects that can be reused on multiple pages. 
  One possability is to use a wiki for all the pages, and then 
transition back to hypervos once S5 is ready for it.   We could have 
some pages consist of more free form brainstorming and draft 
documentation like the current wiki, and some pages be the more public 
facing webpages, but those pages could be smaller but interlinked.  More 
detail below.

If we use a wiki for the main pages, we'd need to hide all the meta wiki 
stuff.

I'm also planning on figuring out how to set up a somewhat customized 
drupal site for a different project, so if that works out maybe we could 
use that.

Sections
--------

I don't think we really need a hierarchy [with the exception of "About", 
see below], at least for the "public facing" aspect.  These links can be 
listen in a little table or grid at the top of the page, like they are 
now (but set in a grid so they line up nicely, perhaps with logical 
groping/separation).

* About [See below]
* Screenshots
* News [redirects to forum announcements]
* Download
* Docs

* Forums
* Mailing Lists
* IRC
* Servers [not at first, but eventually link to running servers]

* Bugz
* Contact


About Section
-------------

This is where we explain what the heck Interreality is, and "sell" it. 
One thing we could do is have a set of short descriptions, each aimed at 
a different kind of person who might be interested, or describe in 
general terms how you might approach solving particular problem or 
implementing a type of idea using VOS.

Docs
----

Here we have short articles that explain how to do specific programming 
tasks with VOS (howto's), as well as the reference manuals.  We should 
probably take S5 as an opportunity to split up the reference manuals, to 
have one for each library.

I don't know if we should just update the "Creating Interreality" 
manual, or split it up into smaller documents.  I'm inclined to split it 
up a bit, or at least separate the "VOS Design" document from the more 
practical program/how-to manuals.