Cygwin/XFree86 Website Design (Possible Deuglification?)

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

The Cygwin/XFree86 website is looking pretty tired:

http://xfree86.cygwin.com/


Things I don't like
===================
1) The green and black header.  Yuk!

2) The hideous X logo.  Yuk!

3) All the crap on the front page.  Most of that stuff should be put on 
secondary pages.

4) News needs its own page.

5) The Screenshots page needs work.  Most of the screenshots are out of 
date.  Several new features need to be shown to entice new users.

6) Screenshots need thumbnails.  People don't like following blind links 
to images.  We should have some thumbnails linking to the images.



Philosophy for changes
======================
1) Content is king.  If we don't have anything to say, we don't need a 
webpage.  The whole point of the webpage is to showcase our information. 
 With that in mind, we aim to make the webpage less ugly, but we can't 
forget that the whole point is to share information.

2) Plain-text bodies are good.  I like being able to add a lot of 
information on a web page without having to deal with stylistic issues.

3) Eye-candy should be relegated to the left-bar, header, right-bar (if 
we want one), footer, and link sections within pages.

4) HTML compliance is a must.  All pages should validate.

5) Don't assume much of web browsers.  Keep away from JavaScript if we 
can (we don't use any yet).  CSS is okay.  DHTML may be pushing it too 
far.  I don't want to spend a lot of time making sure it works with a 
lot of web browsers.


Example sites that I would like to emulate
==========================================
1) http://www.kde.org/ - Good use of color, nice link sections around 
page and in page itself.

2) Huh... couldn't find another example.


Example sites that I do not want to emulate
===========================================
1) http://www.gnome.org/ - Too plain, too dark, not enough info on the 
front page, no link sections, etc.

2) http://xfree86.org/ - This is an example of how I never want our page 
to look.  :)


Next steps
==========
1) Does anyone want to help?

2) Would someone like to make some professional screenshots showcasing 
our most recent new features (Earle's customizable tray-icon menu, 
Alexander putting the -query string in the title bar, multi-window mode, 
the 'always on top' option in the right-click menu in mutli-window mode, 
and the list of icons created by the XFree86-bin-icons package)?

3) Would someone like to pick an overall color scheme and set of styles? 
 Just mock-up the front page for me and send me your .html and .css 
files and I can see what I can do with it.  This would be a huge help.


Let me know what you think,

Harold