I think the home page should be targeted to people who may not know what Wine is. Thus it should *answer* the question 'What is Wine'. The Gimp's web site (http://www.gimp.org/) is a good example in that respect. The first paragraph of the page answers the question 'What is the GIMP?'.
I agree with this; our navigation system right now, while pretty, honestly takes up more real estate than it needs to.
Thus I think there should be a link to the News page but no more. The news page is for returning visitors and if that's what they care about then they should bookmark that page rather than the home page.
Here, I disagree. I think having a short news box, as we have now, gives people a sense of what's going on right now with the project, and gives a sense of vitality.
[snip]
- That brings me to another point. I like the menus in Bugzilla and the
Application Database: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugs/ http://appdb.winehq.com/ I vote for using the same system for WineHQ. This would also bring a better unity of style. Each top-level menu is a 'box' that contains all the level two menu items.
And if we switched to this style, we could unify the appdb and bugzilla looks and it would be a consistent style...
- Who cares about an 'Applications Database'? What's that anyway?
Would a potential Wine user want to have dealings with a database? Nah. Must be for geeks. What users want to know is what applications run in Wine and thus that's how the menu entry and the thing itself should be called: 'Supported Applications'. Even if the truth is that it lists applications that do not work too.
Nice change.
So, here goes:
Home (no menu item for this one, just click on the Wine logo)
About Wine 1.1. Introduction a. Intro b. Why Wine c. Myths d. Technology e. History g. Companies 1.2. Screenshots 1.3. Supported Applications 1.4. Contributing a. Application maintainer b. Bug triage c. Website maintenance d. Development 1.5. News 1.6. Press
Download 2.1. Binaries (installing from binaries) 2.2. Source (installing from source) 2.3. CVS (installing from CVS)
Support 3.1. FAQ 3.2. Howto 3.3. Bug Tracking 3.4. Troubleshooting 3.5. Forums a. Mailing Lists b. Newsgroup c. IRC Channel
Documentation 4.1. User Guide 4.2. Developer Guide 4.3. Packager Guide 4.4. API Docs
Development 5.1. Developer Hints 5.2. Submitting Patches 5.3. TODO Lists - 0.9/1.0 TODOs - Tasklist/bug 395 - FIXMEs/bug 455, - Tasklets/bug 406 - most wanted bugs 5.4. Status 5.5. Resources a. LXR b. CVS Web c. Who's Who d. Tools e. Win32 Documentation, X doc, etc.
Miscellaneous 6.1. Community 6.2. Related projects 6.3. Contacts 6.4. Legal
'Just' 33 menu items (down from 44 for both Dimitrie's and Jeremy's proposals). WineHQ is a big site... Hopefully there's not too much hiding.
I like this quite a bit; however, I still feel that #6 should be "Community"; Contacts and Legal can easily be moved to small footnotes on the top level page and/or the About page.
Just having a 'Misc' category makes my skin crawl, because it always seems like the web designer couldn't be bothere to think something through.
One other issue: if we do switch to an app db style of navigation, then we're going to need a lot of content to fill in items (iow, we're going to need stuff to fill in for 2.a, 3.a, 4.a, and so on).
Jer