[LLVMdev] Web Site Re-Design

[Chris Lattner]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Gabriel McArthur wrote:
> I offered to do the web site a couple of weeks ago.  Life got in the
> way temporarily, and it took me a long time to make it look the way
> that I wanted and to make it look the same in IE6.  Anyway, I wanted
> to get some feedback on what I had done.

Oooh, very cool.  I don't hate it, which is quite the accomplishment ;-)

Lots of other people are nit-picking the presentation, I'll pick on the 
content (besides, obviously people hate my presentation skills 
significantly more than yours :).  Specifically, please please please 
consider using the content that I've started setting up the the 'website' 
module in subversion.

You can see what I have so far here:
   http://testing.nondot.org/

> Some concerns:
> 1.  SSI and JavaScript seem like overkill.  Each subproject can have
> their own look and feel by overriding the CSS (...cascading...) --
> all of the images are in the CSS, not the page.

I agree partially.  The reason for SSI's has two parts:
1. I want the sidebar to be defined in a single place.
2. I want the documentation to integrate "perfectly" with the web page, 
and "good enough" when viewed standalone.  For example, if you take a look 
at this page: http://testing.nondot.org/AdvUsers.html you can load the 
html file locally (which doesn't process the SSIs) and the page is quite 
readable (though not perfectly valid html).

I don't see a good way to do this without either client or server side 
SSIs.  I'm much more fond of SSIs than CSIs, because you don't need the 
client to be smart :)

> 2.  It relies rather heavily on transparent PNGs, which may cause
> problems for some (though I have yet to encounter any in the 4
> browsers I have tried)
> 3.  I only have 2 screen resolutions to try it out on, so I'm not
> sure if anyone else out there will have any rendering issues (it
> looks a little "chunky" in Safari -- will investigate further).

no opinion

> 4.  I have only finished the first page and part of the Download page
> (some of the site is really kind of confusing -- that needs to be
> resolved by someone, and I'll try more as I go along)

Yeah, the current web page has evolved into a really unorganized mess. 
Some will trivialize the amount of content that is available in the svn 
repository, but I spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to 
categorize things better and how to make the site more accessible for 
'newbies'.

> 5.  I would recommend establishing a wiki or "CRM" system where
> everybody who is registered (trusted users/whatever) can contribute;
> that might help to cut back on the profusion/diaspora/melee of
> information, some of which can and should be updated more frequently
> and with less of a hassle than putting it into SVN/CVS.

I'm not sure what you mean.  We do have a wiki, do you think the main site 
should be there?

The organization that I would like to see is:

1. The page is explicitly broken into subprojects.  The top-level is
    served out of the 'website' module.
2. Each subproject (e.g. core, llvm-gcc, clang, hlvm, etc) gets its own
    subdomain (e.g. http://clang.llvm.org, these already exist, but
    currently have an autoforward set up).
3. Each subproject gets a www directory (the top-level for their
    subdomain's content) and a docs directory (which gets checked out under
    www, e.g. http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ )
4. Each subproject can in theory do their own thing, and I think it would
    be good for the major different subprojects to have different color
    schemes, but they should use the same web scaffolding.  Ideally the
    customization would just be through their local css file.

Does this seem reasonable?

> 6.  Lastly, and most importantly, I am not a professional web
> designer or graphic artist, so I definitely need some feedback about
> things people don't like/would like to see changed.

Looks pretty nice to me!

-Chris

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