New Web Pages

[Sean Egan]

On 8/10/07, Ethan Blanton <elb at pidgin.im> wrote:
> > 1) Javascript detection of platform to display custom download links on
> > the home page.  Is this something that should also be displayed on the
> > main downloads page, instead of the list of links (or how do we want
> > this to work?)
> Personally, I think the front page should be "magic", and the download
> page should, at most, rearrange its links so that the user's primary
> platform is on top.  I hate sites where I have to dig because they
> mis-guessed what platform I wanted (like, say, I'm downloading files
> to install on my Linux machine from my wife's Mac).  However, I'm more
> or less ambivalent to any decisions here.

I think the front page should definitely be "magic," in that it should
contain a link directly to the file you want. Then, it should have an
"Other packages" link that goes to /download/windows or
download/source according to said magic. Perhaps /download itself
should even be magic and act like /download/foo.

as long as that menu is there, there will never be additional
"digging" needed if we mis-guess.

> > 2) The news!  Where is news supposed to appear on the main page?  Right
> > now, on the current live site, it looks kind of ugly or misplaced.  It
> > won't fit on the talk bubble the way the images are designed, though I
> > can probably rework them if needed, though the space available would
> > still be limited (or face a giant talk bubble).
> I think the main page talk bubble is intended not to show a news
> article from the news page, but a single sentence like "Pidgin 2.1.0
> is out!".

Right. The current site has a short, one-sentence bit of news under
the pigeon. It also has a more-prominent, not-yet-used, alert box at
the very top, which I requested when it became obvious everyone just
ignores that news.

> I think the plan is that the main Pidgin news feed will also be a
> blog, and that the news page will just be a set of aggregators with
> various feeds.  This doesn't need to be particularly dynamic, though;
> there's no reason we can't build the aggregated blogs with some sort
> of cron job.  I think this is what planet.pidgin.im does, actually.

that is what planet.pidgin.im does, and I'm cool with that.

> > 3) The donations page(s)!  Where does this page even go?  How will it
> > work?  Does this need to be registration-based?  If so, could it tie
> > into trac accounts to make things less complicated?

IM me ;)

In either case, let's get the new stuff up before worrying about the
donations page, just so we know the server can handle it first.

-s.