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Subject: 
Re: New homepage for LUGNET
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish.html, lugnet.general
Date: 
Fri, 20 Feb 2004 23:11:20 GMT
Viewed: 
76 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, Frank Filz wrote:
   So you will see me being an advocate for the capability of older browsers to be able to use the site without too much pain. If something can be done with plain old HTML, do it that way.

I agree with Frank here 100%. Not everybody has Javascript enabled, and if they have to fool around with their browser settings every time they want to visit, that’ll drive people away if nothing will.

Showers are great places for thinking. Random thoughts from the tub:

LUGNET is not LEGOFan.net. Therefore while links to all the other major sites would be nice, that should not be the primary purpose. Furthermore, any newbies that visit looking for other sites are going to use it once, then bookmark straight to their site of choice - not LUGNET. So I think that while links would be a good thing, they should not be the focus. A sidebar, perhaps (like Classic-Castle’s).

Re: the logofest: I think like Erik said, we need to be byte-concious. I think a goal should be to keep the entire frontpage loading size to 100KB or less. That will keep loading time for dialups at around two seconds and for 33KB/sec’ers that’ll be around four seconds. The average user will find a different website if the page takes longer than twelve seconds to load. I don’t know what kind of traffic LUGNET gets, but I don’t think the front page should be slow to load. If anything I think it should be the fastest thing - after all, it’s really only an umpteen-way intersection.

Links to other sites: above I said I think the links to other sites should not be the focus. However, I don’t see anything wrong with logos or buttons. The standard 90-pixel button would be fine, I think. Even a dozen of them won’t take too long to load, provided they’re compressed properly.

Tim mentioned a middle section of the site perhaps being devoted to news and such. When I visited BZPower yesterday, I liked their system of having ‘reporters.’ It occurred to me that a ‘latest news’ system could be easily managed by delegating one or perhaps more people to each major site (BrickLink, BZPower, LEGO.com, BrickShelf, 1000steine, etc). They would be responsible for “reporting” anything of particular wide interest. A blog sort of system could be easily set up to handle this.

Usually when someone arrives at a website, their eye movement starts at the center of the page, then makes a large circle outward from about 9 o’clock. Thus a good frontpage design should have the most important stuff at the right side (maybe the main sidebar), then the middle important news, then stuff of lesser importance on the side (the left sidebar could be a dynamic thing, only loading on certain pages (that would require more than HTML - php can do it, and probably ASP) as is appropriate to the content) and finally the least important stuff (footer, maybe a large table of button/logo links) at the bottom. Whatever you do, *don’t* put the main sidebar on the left. Natural eye movement is from left to right, top to bottom (in printed matter - electronic media usually follows the circle I described earlier), so put the most important stuff like navbars where people will see it first. Don’t make it mentally hard to move around the page.

And right about then my shower was over, so that was as far as I thought. Perhaps some of them will be good thoughts.

Oh, one other thing - I agree with whoever it was that said they like’d Suzanne’s proto. It’s clean, it’s stylish and it’s fast loading. Plus it appears to be mostly text and therefore won’t be a pain to load even on a slow day.

-Mike



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: New homepage for LUGNET
 
(...) I was thinking more like 50KB or less. The current homepage weighs in at 44.2KB, of which 27.7KB of this is images. It's pretty easy to keep small images down to 1 or 2 KB each (or even less) if care is taken. Many of the LUGNET toolbar icons (...) (21 years ago, 21-Feb-04, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish.html, lugnet.general, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: New homepage for LUGNET
 
"Andrew Allan" <aallan@ozemail.com.au> wrote in message news:HtDvsD.qBG@lugnet.com... (...) Not in my book... JavaScript seems to cause problems in the browsers I tend to use (somewhat old versions of Netscape and MSIE - perhaps I should upgrade, (...) (21 years ago, 20-Feb-04, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish.html, lugnet.general)

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