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In lugnet.admin.general, Frank Filz wrote:
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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.
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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
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