At 12:09 PM 7/2/2005 +0100, you wrote:
>stéphane ducasse wrote:
>>Hi guys
>>I'm wondering why we are still pointing to this crappy web site and  not 
>>the new one?
>>http://www.squeak.org:7777/
>>Stef
>
>The old site is not "crappy" and the new site is still inferior compared 
>to the old one. If anything is "crappy" it is the home page of the new site.

I wish I had the first paragraph from the old site, but other than that, I 
think the new site is a better presentation for Squeak to the uninitiated.

>To repeat it to your deaf ears: This home page is a doorway page. It has 
>almost no text but mainly links to other sites. From a search engine 
>perspective such a change from the old to the new page indicates that 
>someone wants to prop up the page ranking of the linked sites.....

And the old site had much text on it?

>But the opposite will happen, Google's internal page ranking of such a 
>page will drop severely and the linked sites will not benefit, especially 
>if they link back.
>
>The visitors perspective looks similar, a visitor of squeak.org wants to 
>be informed about Squeak and not be sent away.
>
>Regarding the style I have to say that I like the old site much more. It 
>has an idiosyncratic charm, the new site looks like thousands of other 
>sites. Even the font and font size of old "crappy" squeak.org is more 
>inviting for a further read.

The old (current) site uses Times New Roman as a default font. TNR is a 
retched, hard to read font that was designed to cram as much information in 
as small a space as possible (for the New York Times newspaper), something 
you needn't worry about of a web page.

  I agree that new site's font defaults of  Verdana ( boring), Arial (even 
worse), and Helvetica are almost as bad as using Comic Sans. How about a 
readable serif font?

And by the way,  specifying font sizes in pixels is just plain bogus, it's 
too small for all other platforms than Windoze, especially when using 
screen sizes greater than 800x600.


>Martin
>
>
>