refreshed website soft launched

[Anastasia Cheetham]

On 21-Feb-09, at 12:26 AM, Jess Mitchell wrote:

>  we "soft launched" the Fluid website today... and we want feedback.


Wow! This looks fabulous! Laurel, Jacob and Erin: Wonderful work, and  
stupendous effort! I know there was quite a push at the end to get it  
out, and it looks to me like it was worth the effort!

General comments:

I like the side tabs as a way of handling those pages that would have  
been too busy. I wonder if the text in the tabs is a bit large,  
relative to the text size in the top links? (The side tabs are bigger  
than the top tabs, which seems odd to me, since they're second-level  
navigation.) Also, at first, I thought the fact that the active tab  
was wider than the other tabs was a bug, but after clicking, I see  
that it's intentional.

Text size: I find the font size used for body text to be quite small  
on my 1680x1050 monitor (especially relative to the header size). I  
imagine it will look just fine on my 1024x768 laptop at home, so I'm  
not sure what a solution might be, but I just thought I'd mention it,  
since you asked for feedback :-)

Downloads page:

I love the table showing the component status, and the direct links to  
JIRAs in the Known Issues section. Good ideas, whoever came up with  
them!

Project pages:

Both the Fluid Academic page and the Fluid Engage page seem to use the  
header as the beginning of the first sentence, and then the actual  
first sentence starts with "is ..." I'm not fond of this approach,  
maybe because of the aforementioned difference in size between the  
headers and the text. Mentally, I do NOT make the required connection  
between the header and the text, so what I see is just a sentence with  
no beginning. Just my two cents worth... I'm happy to change this, if  
the powers that be agree.

Partners pages:

This is probably already on the list, but: The CollectionSpace and  
Opencast partners pages have nothing but the project link, and a links  
with the text "Link to XX Partners." It looks unfinished. (I'm  
guessing that's because it *is* unfinished :-)


Stress Testing:

I tried clicking every link, just to make sure they all basically  
worked, and found one small bug that was so easy to fix that I just  
went ahead and fixed it: The "The Fluid Community" link at the  
beginning of the "About Us -> Our Mission" page was linking to http://fluidproject.org/index.php/partners 
, which isn't a valid page. I guessed, and changed it to http://fluidproject.org/index.php/fluid-academic-partners 
. I hope it's ok that I made this change.

-- 
Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
Software Designer, Fluid Project    http://fluidproject.org
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto