[vos-d] thinking about a new web site

[Peter Amstutz]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 07:56:09PM -0400, Reed Hedges wrote:
> 
> 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.

Sure.  I did the current design a few years ago based on an even older 
design of yours (still online at http://interreality.sourceforge.net/ 
!!!)  (we should probably take down the sourceforce page, although it is 
of historical interest ;-)

Anyway, I don't claim to be a competent graphic designer, and the 
interreality.org cascading style sheet has grown completely out of 
control, so it is probably time to start over from scratch from a design 
standpoint.

Anybody want to help do a new site design?

> 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. 

Having updated the pages, I think it's worth staying with HyperVOS for 
now.  We'll want to transition to an s5-based system eventually, but we 
need s5 first.

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

I've seen quite a few projects that use a more or less straight up wiki 
for their whole site, take http://bazaar-vcs.org/ for example.  Hiding 
the wiki links does look more polished, though.

> 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

That's pretty much what it is divided up into right now, minus a 
"contact" page, and no "servers" page since there are none.

> About Section/Docs
> ------------------

My main concern is that so much stuff is changing, in terms of both 
overall goals (trying to be a more focused on addressing specific tasks) 
and in the specifics of the technology, its hard to write useful 
documentation until development has settled down a bit.

-- 
[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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