[Qgis-developer] Main website design

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 11/17/2012 12:14 PM, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to propose that maybe now that we have some extra cash
> thanks to our gold sponsor that it might be good to spend at little bit
> on a main website design.  I think $1000 would get a pretty nice home
> page and IMO it is well worth the money.  Most designs on 99designes[0]
> are around $700 and look quite good.
>
> The main page page of a project makes all the difference when it comes
> to the impression it leaves on users and this is one thing I think it is
> worth spending a little money on to get a professional job done.
>
> Thoughts.

Hi Nathan,

I agree that as a project it is great to have a nice website layout.

But my experience with a lot of designers like the ones from 99designes 
is that they can create a really nice looking frontpage, but often only 
from scratch, and only with their own tools and scripts.

While in my opinion we should have a relatively simple website design 
(looking at Google stuff) which we can reuse in all our web/html/html stuff.

So not only a nice looking frontpage, But also:
- created using the templating system of Sphinx (because we want to have 
this as a localisation framework)
- created with OR behaving like the bootstrap framework: responsive 
design (both on desktop and phone looking nice) (and we can use the 
relatively simple generated html also into QGIS itself (clicking help in 
a certain dialog just shows a part of the docs into a popup).
- simple simple simple flat structure, so you always now where you are 
in the simple simple hierarchy
- having a good index OR good search engine OR google searchable is in 
my opnion more important than a frontpage overloaded with links to all 
functional corners of website and docs

Concluding: it is fine to spent some money on someone who has clear 
ideas on usability and webdesign, but please let it be one who at least 
is able to use our framework and preferably can implement his/her ideas 
him/herself in our framework (because it think that is our main problem...)

Regards,

Richard