[maemo-community] Website design meeting last night

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi all,

We had a really good IRC meeting last night on the design of the
website. Here's a short description of the main points to come out of it.

Attendance (IRC nicks):
dneary
Peres
acunha_
etrunko
glaubertsouza
X-Fade (for a while)

Order of business:
1. How will Maemo team work with INdT?
2. What are the deliverables & schedule? (ie. what's the scope?)

After that, we talked about what we expected from each other in the
short term, and agreed to meet again next week, same time, same place,
on IRC to resolve any blockages at that time.

1. Method

I proposed twice over the past two weeks a way for us to work more
effectively together: a small group of Maemo people (myself, Tim, Jaffa)
will represent the community to INdT's designers. we will know who is
working on the redesign, and we will work openly in the maemo-community
mailing list.

We agreed the following method for working together, to maximise
opportunity for community feedback, but ensure a chain of responsibility
so that we know who is responsible at any given time.

When a new design is available, it will be posted in the wiki, and an
email will be sent to the mailing list linking to it, and asking for
feedback. The wiki page will record decisions, discussion will happen on
the mailing list. Requests for revisions will come through myself, Tim
and Jaffa, to prevent having too many (perhaps incompatible) requests
being made of the design team.

2. Scope

The end deliverable is clear:

   maemo.org completely available with a new theme

To get there, there are a number of things we need to accomplish:
 - Lay out Development, Support and Community, three new second-level
pages in maemo.org
 - Finalise a design & lay-out of the new front page
 - Choose a new style & look for the entire website


Short-term:

New design proposal
===================

I proposed (as Tim suggested previously) that we should have a number of
design proposals to consider before we decide what design to adapt.
Currently we have two very similar proposals:

- Tim's layout & design suggestion:
http://samoff.maemobox.org/maemo_redesign/samoff-maemo.org-redesign_idea_0009b-loggedout.png
- Andre's response, based heavily on Tim's proposal (and which Tim has
suggested some tweaks for): https://wiki.maemo.org/Image:HOME_03_MOD.png

We agreed that a third, independent, design would be useful, and that
the designer should not feel constrained to what Tim suggested in terms
of layout (even if we have agreement on content).

Glaubert has already worked on another proposal, and will finalise it
and send it to the list this week (Tuesday or Wednesday).

I have revised
https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Improving_maemo.org#Maemo.org_Homepage_refresh
to retain the elements that we have agreed will be on the front page,
but I insisted that I want to give the design team considerable freedom
in the choice of colour scheme and layout for those elements.


Layout of new pages
===================

There are 3 entirely new pages to be laid out (and, undoubtedly, the
content will need some revision). The content proposals for them are at:
https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Improving_maemo.org/Community
https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Improving_maemo.org/Support
https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Improving_maemo.org/Development

Each of these pages need some designer input for wire-framing & mock-ups.

Pages to include in design proposals
====================================

Aside from the front page, Andre suggested that it would be useful to
have some pages whose content will not change, to see how the design
will look on other secondary pages.

Some suggestions for pages off the front page whose content will not
change in the website revision, and which could be used to test new
themes, are:

http://maemo.org/downloads/
http://maemo.org/news/
http://maemo.org/intro/
http://maemo.org/profile/view/qgil

Perhaps the intro/ page might be most representative of a typical
Midgard generated page.

Schedule
========

It was agreed to finalise the design process and choose the final design
in 2 weeks. We will meet again on IRC at the same time next week (18:00
CET) to review progress. It is important to make progress transparent by
having all work go to the mailing list this week.




There you go - rather than posting a log of the entire discussion, I
thoughht it would be more useful to post a summary which identified the
key points we agreed on.

Cheers,
Dave.


-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org