On Mon, 04 Jul 2005 18:34:32 -0600, "John Pfersich" <jp1660 at att.net>
said:
> At 12:09 PM 7/2/2005 +0100, you wrote:
> >stéphane ducasse wrote:
> >
> >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.

I agree overall.

Well, except for the bit about the first paragraph from the old site...
that paragraph goes a bit too far in making it sound like Squeak is only
a tool for educational purposes, so it's best to move it out into a
different section.

> >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?

Good point, though it had a bit more.  Although looking at both sites
again now, the amount of content is almost the same.  (Some of this may
have just been added.)  The main things missing on the new site are the
Tutorials and Features sections, which could be copied over in part. 
But you could make a good case that some sections (such as Alice,
Scamper, etc) should not be copied over.

In any case, the overall amount of content on either site is reasonable
IMO.  At this point our community simply doesn't have the resources to
maintain a huge amount of centralized static website content.  Period. 
Which is fine... we could make the site appear larger by including other
site content at the same domain, e.g. seaside.squeak.org which is a good
idea.

Of course, the content on the new site could still use some further
improvement, which is not necessarily an easy job.

(By the way, someone should remove the "Entering 2000"/"Where is Squeak
Headed?" links from the old site NOW.  This type of old content is very
damaging and makes Squeak look like a dead project.  If you have any
doubts about this, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IsSqueakDead .)

> >...
> >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?

I think you're being picky here.  Yes, something like Comic Sans or
Courier would be a disaster, but Times New Roman is readable, if on the
boring side.  I think Verdana is OK too, although a serif font is
generally preferable for paragraphs of text.  Perhaps the new site font
could be a bit larger too, but it's not abnormally small.

Also, it's a bit rude to say the current fonts are bad and not actually
offer any alternative suggestions.

(Hey, python.org is Times New Roman, and ruby-lang.org looks like
Verdana! :) )

> 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.

I can agree with that.

- Doug