Site Redesign

[Charles]

When Todd chose the black links I was somewhat skeptical but willing to give them a try. Although they do keep the site looking elegant in my opinion, I think they are not as functional as colored links. Also, as hopscc pointed out, they are not congruent with most other web sites.

I knew we had more work to do on links anyway since they are presented differently throughout the site. For example, in Trac they are dotted underlined, but in solid underlined elsewhere. Todd, I recall your comment that link presentation is context-sensitive and I agree to some extent. But static documents, forum posts and Trac pages are all essentially "user written prose about Cobra programming". The links between those should be the same presentation.

So we will need some shade of blue or red that fits in with the existing colors.

Hops, I couldn't follow you on the fonts. They look damn fine to me on Safari on Mac. Last time I checked on Windows, they looked okay. Can you tell us your op sys, browser name and browser version? Also, you may wish to attach a screenshot, or you can email me, so we can see what you see. I definitely want the fonts to look sharp, so I'm interested to hear back.

I agree that I cannot easily see what wiki links are outstanding to be populated. If we switch to colored links that should get resolved.

How about link underlining? I like solid; Todd prefers dotted.

I still plan on changing the color set each month for a fresh look. I wouldn't describe it as "random" since a human such as myself or Todd will pick the colors. And look on the bright side: if you don't like the look, you have only month before it will change.

Btw Cobra code in Trac wiki pages and tickets is now syntax highlighted if the first line of code is "#!cobra". This is a Trac convention which then calls out to the Pygments library to do the work. Thanks to Todd for getting this working. Coming soon for phpBB for all those who used <cobra> tags (with square brackets).

[hopscc]

WIn Xp, Firefox 4.0B7.

Cobra code is now colorised so where thats done some difference is discernable (OTOH if you cant differentiate colors well ...)

The enclosing box also helps (and the too subtle background shading) but barring that theres not a strong difference in the fonts (mono vs var spacing) [which there was for the previous scheme.

heres for quoting vs discussion in Forums.

QuotevsDiscussionFont.png (15.98 KiB) Viewed 5231 times

re links - at the moment you cant even see them - heres the wiki statements page - all the items after the bullets are links
how could you tell?

wiki-statements-links.png (14.2 KiB) Viewed 5231 times

If you stare hard enough you may be able to distinguish the underline but its not a strong enough affordance which is why normal web pages permanently color them (blue) AND underline them when they are moused over (NOT color them same as the text and recolor them on mouseover which is the current case).

[hopscc]

Forgot to say re changing the colors monthly;

Still think this is a mistake

The best 'fresh look' for a web page is additional content - I'd imagine most people would prefer that to a refreshed color theme combination
personally I find it annoying to return to a page whose color scheme has changed with no or little new content or no layout change - it smacks of change for the sake of making it look like something has happened

The current brown-Poo color scheme doesnt give me a good feeling about future human selected choices (sorry )

conversely If i do like the colors I only have them for a month before they change

re links
FWIW
solid underlining (of colored links) on mouseover.

[torial]

The current brown-Poo color scheme doesnt give me a good feeling about future human selected choices (sorry )

If it helps, think of it not as poo, but wood/autumn overtones. I'm not a fan of the brown theme, but I don't think it is an ugly color theme. I only ask we avoid a red color theme

[Charles]

I was thinking blue and white for December.

I love black+red+white, so you'll see it some month!

[torial]

Is this where I yell, "Khan!!", "Khan!!"?

I expect Black/Red/White should be fine, was mostly concerned with Dark Red / Light Red, etc... theme...

[todd.a]

hopscc, the fonts in the quote and the fonts in regular text area EXACTLY the same. The font used is the same as was used by phpBB before but I guess we can go with the site font for now.

The color used here is much closer to Coppertone than anything else.

Yes, if you keep thinking "poo" then psychologically that is what will come to mind. Torial hit the nail right on the head this is more along an autumn/fall (though this was not the rationale) line which you will see in sites that do seasonal changes.

Personally the links are discernible for me, if viewers are having trouble differentiating then we have a usability issue and will gladly correct it. Like Chuck said, using a shade of red could be a possible solution. Guys it's 2010 (not 1996) you can display a link however you want as long as people know it's a link.

Disclaimer I could be color blind or my monitor could be off (I'm pretty sure it's correct at the moment though) .

[torial]

Wiki is far more responsive... did you get rid of unnecessary Trac extensions? Looks a lot nicer too!

[Charles]

Actually I didn't disable any Trac modules. So the speed will either be from disabling Apache modules and/or a simpler page structure enabling faster rendering by your browser.

Todd updated the links to be colored.

There are still a few more refinements left to do like adding links from the Downloads page to the wiki pages for IDE Support and Editor Support. But we're in pretty good shape right now.

Thanks to Todd for all his help, and thanks for the feedback and encouragement from everyone.

[hopscc]

Guys it's 2010 (not 1996) you can display a link however you want as long as people know it's a link

yes you can but that doesnt make it a good idea
The point is:
How do you know its a link if its uncoloured or randomly colored and its mouseover behaviour is arbitrarily different than 90% of every other web page
yes - very avant-garde and using the very latest capabilities but not very recognisable

If it helps, think of it not as poo, but wood/autumn overtones

OK I've tried that but it doesnt help - still looks like poo/mud color ( neither autumn or wood colors here are particularly near that shade)..

The colorisation of comments in the cobra code needs to be darker ( or different). The light grey shade (and italic ish font) make it very hard to see much less read.