[Vit-discuss] Redesign 2005 Blog

[David A. Black]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, John W. Long wrote:

> David A. Black wrote:
>> Very nice work by all concerned.  I don't have a strong preference as
>> between the two on view.  One question for John: would it be possible
>> to avoid the duplication between the navigation bar and those
>> navigation squares?  I know what people are going to say: the navbar
>> has to serve on different sub-pages and therefore can't be changed.  I
>> tend to think it should be anyway :-)  It looks a little cluttered to
>> have "Learn Ruby" and "Download" right about "Learn" and "Download".
>
> That's an interesting suggestion. I suppose that it would depend on how the 
> site was structured. I personally believe it is important to repeat the major 
> site sections on the home page in the header and footer. I really value the 
> importance of simple designs with lots of repetition (between pages). Perhaps 
> the solution is to make the Download, Learn, and Build sections subsections 
> of other major sections. For instance, Learn could easily be a subsection of 
> the documentation section.
>
> On the other side, I'm not sure the ideal (no-repetition on the same page) is 
> worth splitting hairs over. Sometimes the search for the ideal can lead to 
> very unpractical solutions. I much prefer the pragmatic approach. At some 
> point we need to map out the site completely. Right now we are just 
> experimenting. Once we get down to the "raw" html we may change quite a few 
> things.
>
> "In theory there is no difference between practice and theory, in practice 
> there is."

I didn't really mean to probe the theoretical substrata.  It just
looks slightly cluttered :-)  I assumed things will change as work
continues, so I wanted to mention one or two things I thought might
merit attention during that process.  No deep design philosophy to be
extrapolated :-)

One possible resolution would be to put the navbar at the very top of
the page, instead of between the header and the "real" content.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack at wobblini.net