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Re: [pygame] Re: sprint this weekend



I don't know if starting over or reverting is better than movement. At this point any movement is good. I would rather see us build on something that people are building on than try and get a project going (which keeps not seeming to go anywhere). But the new layout is pretty tough to swallow. I remember commenting as such before when this design was proposed - I thought it was abandoned. It's appalling on many levels:

Horizontal scrolling is not fun, keeping reading left-right and scrolling up-down helps us compartmentalize better. Having so many different, unrelated pieces of content in one screen is distracting and confusing. While scrolling over you may suddenly, without warning, find yourself on a different section of the site, and you have to look up at the menu to even know which section you are on, because they all look the same. The width of the users browser fundamentally changes how the site feels. At the fullscreen view that I normally browse in, I see about half of the "about" module. It's super distracting! When reading through the reddit content, my eye keeps being pulled over to the about, and then I can't even read it because it is cut off. And then, when I go over to the "learn" section, the question and answer module is cut-off. So if I want Q+A, I have to click on "learn" and then click on the "right arrow". It is unintuitive and clunky at the same time. If you are going to make it clunky, it might as well be consistently clunky.

The priority of which content is displayed where doesn't feel right. The first page should be about helping newcomers figure out what pygame is, whether they should use it, and where they can get help. Content you want to see shouldn't be cut off on the sides of the screen forcing you to scroll around to find it. If you scroll down just a little, you lose all context of which section you are in, as well as what any of the modules are!

I don't get the music player. It doesn't seem to fit.

General color scheme, fonts, and layout look ugly. Sorry to say.

Some ideas to fix it:

* Rather than squish all "sections" on the same window, keep them separate. Don't allow scrolling between sections, just update the div with each section
* Include a table of contents in each section to show which modules are available. It's painful to have to horizontal scroll several times to even see what's there.
* I would actually stick with the tried-and-true content column + sidebar column style. You can have the more important modules in the left column with more width, and stack them vertically, with less important ones on the side, also stacked vertically. For example, learn would have on the left: about + tutorial + cookbook, and then on the right: help and a shorter length list of q+a (which can be expanded potentially?)
* Ditch music player or have a link to pop one up in a new window if people want it.

... for a start.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 10:03 PM, Luke Paireepinart <rabidpoobear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Al,
What sort of mistakes are you talking about and where do you draw the line of starting over vs. fixing mistakes?

From: Al Sweigart
Sent: â8/â18/â2015 5:57 PM
To: pygame-users@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [pygame] Re: sprint this weekend

I highly recommend switching to the old site and abandoning this design. There's a lot of things about the new design that don't work from a design & usability perspective.

It's clear that a lot of work has gone into the new site, and I don't want to disparage these efforts. But the end result is a site that is worse than the previous one. Honestly, I don't think the new design can be salvaged. It's best to cut losses, go back to the old design for now, and try again.

Again, this criticism sounds blunt and rough, but the new design has several large mistakes that any web designer would point out. There were issues with the old site, but I think the best course of action is to switch back to it and abandon this new design.

-Al

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Jeffrey Danowitz <danowitz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I know that sadly I have not been a big participant in all the amazing things happening lately in PyGame.

However, I think that the new site is absolutely amazing and wonderful. I am not an expert in making usable websites. I am just talking from my own personal experience after having my jaws drop at the plethora of material included in the site. I think that those who worked on this and actually did the work should be congratulated. Itâs really an awesome experience to come to this new site and see how this project has developed.Â

I would be happy to find out about things that need to be done with this project that perhaps I can help out with. Feel free to be in touch with me.

Jeff

On Aug 18, 2015, at 17:53 , Paul Vincent Craven <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think the site should be formed around the top use cases. I think the book "don't make me think" is a wonderful guide to making websites usable.

1.) Download and install pygame
2.) Quick "what is pygame"
3.) Documentation / Sample code
4.) Share user projects
5.) News

I think the main landing page should probably have links to these and not much else. Maybe show top news 'below the fold.'


Paul Vincent Craven

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:23 AM, Sam Bull <sam.hacking@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2015-08-18 at 15:18 +0200, adam.hasvers@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Sam, I think everything you are asking for is there under the first two headers.

I'm not seeing them...

>Â Â Â Â ÂRecent news on the front page.

This is fine, front and centre.

>Â Â Â Â ÂLink to documentation and tutorials.

There are a number of confusingly named headers, of which I have no idea
what I'm looking for. When arriving on the home page, I want to see a
docs link in the header, rather than have to decipher that I need the
'learn' header, and then finding the link somewhere in paragraph of
text.

>Â Â Â Â ÂLink to suggested libraries and utilities to use with Pygame.

I'm not seeing this anywhere. On the old website, this was also not easy
enough to find, nor was the page well maintained/formatted.

>Â Â Â Â ÂLink to page where I can browse interesting Pygame projects.

Recent releases are shown on the home page. I instinctively expect the
header of that to be a link to the full page where I'll be able to
browse projects. But, it is not a link, and I don't see a place to
browse projects.

>Â Â Â Â ÂLink to support locations (mailing list, bug tracker, source
>Â Â Â Â Âcode etc.)

Again, not finding this. The best I see is recent issues and commits.
Again this is not useful to me, and I expect clicking the header to take
me to the actual source and bug tracker sites, but they don't.