Re: Site facelift?

[locust]

It's apparent to me, after looking at all the comments, that some of you wold like to see the site updated while others do not.

Perhaps we should create a poll that's on the front page and let the community vote on it. Maybe at first we could create a poll that let's people rate the site:

1. Awesome!
2. Meh
3. Blows

I don't know, something like that. Run that for a month or two. Once those results are tallied, then you can figure out how to raise money to get the site revamped or find a designer that's willing to take on the project.

The mock ups could be voted on by the community as well with another poll, or offer some different style sheets they can choose from. Maybe even keep this one around named "retro", but I wouldn't use it as the default.

[luis.roca]

Good idea. I definitely think we should at least have a pole. It could be as simple and direct as:

Do you think the design of Perl Monks needs to:

• Be Refreshed
• Stay As Is

That's it. Two choices. If the community decides on a redesign we can talk about a direction. If not... then, well — nothing.
Can someone with the appropriate powers put this up?

[tye]

To me, that reminds me of the reasoning that leads to people asking in the chatterbox, "Can anybody answer a Catalyst question?"

It is pretty useless to get a feel for how for or against members are to site changes in the abstract. And trying to gauge a mandate, solicit contributions, form a committee team, and come up with a new design sounds like a perfect way to make no progress.

If you really want a change in site appearance to happen, then sit down, look at the details, and produce a new appearance and then offer up your concrete, real, precise, can-be-tried-out suggestion of an improvement / alternative. Then we can gauge how people like or dislike that (and all can make concrete suggestions about how to improve it). Heck, much of the time we don't even have to do that, we just make it available as an option.

This is how the "Perl Blue" theme came to be.

One minor request from me. I think it'd be great to change the default theme, especially in fairly minor ways. But I'm somewhat reluctant to make the default be the "Perl Blue" theme. Changing the default theme to be the same as the most popular not-currently-default theme means that a lot of people will have a harder time telling when they somehow got logged out. I'd like to have a new theme that is more likely to appeal to casual visitors and at least one additional new theme that has some features that would appeal to more "serious" members where those features are likely to be noticed more than the <h1><blink> warnings that we have added. ;)

Update: (Yes, I should do this as a new reply. Sorry, I'm not going to.) And, if you want a new "look" to be the default, then you can't use fixed sizes for elements. I'm so sick of the ubiquity of CSS page designs that throw in "width: 600 px;" for no reason.

[chromatic]

If the community decides on a redesign we can talk about a direction.

Nothing happens because some subset of a community who cares enough to vote casts votes. Things only happen because someones do them.

[luis.roca]

     Nothing happens because some subset of a community who cares enough to vote casts votes. Things only happen because someones do them.

That's fine. I started looking over the CSS last night. The upcoming holiday and work will put some demands on my time this week but I will make it a point to address this as much as possible. Hopefully that translates into having something to show before the end of the following week.

[Anonymous Monk]

someones do them nao? hard?

[locust]

Agreed.