Thanks for the feedback. A test web page would take a bit more time than I
have right now, so I'm not sure when that will happen. Maybe once we zero
in on a promising design. Probably after The Omega Zone is published, and
we might have time to put some work into a redesign.
I'm imagining that at a certain narrow screen width, rather than scaling
the text links at the top, we would have them stack vertically instead of
horizontally.
Regarding the page width, this does give us the opportunity to make the
page a bit wider by default, but for readability, I wouldn't want the main
text to sprawl across an HD screen, for example. We might be able to fill
some of that empty space with a sidebar (that would be rearranged or
disappear on narrow screens?), but what would be most useful to put in a
sidebar? News blurbs? Mini sitemap with descriptions? Subscription and
social media links (to currently inactive Facebook and Twitter accounts)?
I see what you mean about the News header.
Google allows a separate mobile site, but ideally we'll be able to serve
both needs with one design.
We should probably tighten up the "about us" text, describing Lone Wolf for
the uninitiated, briefly describe our mission, etc. and ending with a link
for a longer description. We might also remove or resize the Lone Wolf logo
to bring more text into the first screenful.
You can see a few more doodles here:
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/jonathan/website-redesign/
I dug up the font we're currently using for the website logo (Black Adder
II). I tried a square logo for #2. For #4, I dropped the Blog and Sanctum
links as somewhat redundant with the News and Help Us links. I'm liking #4.
--
Jon
On Mon, 8 Jun 2015 at 10:55 Nicholas Jankowski <jankowskin@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
can a test web page get posted? would we worth viewing on a mobile device.
the graphic of the page doesn't really show how it might render.
some thoughts: links across the top: how well are they going to scale for
a phone, versus a tablet, versus a PC. I know a lot of people who get
frustrated at websites 'mobilizing' their sites, resulting in silly big
buttons/links on a PC, or really narrow websites (as this graphic appears
on my not-very-widescreen monitor)
I would recommend a NEWS header before the news starts.
I don't mind starting with what amounts to the "About us" text, but from
a functionality standpoint is that better than making the navigation links
the central part of the main page? and/or can there be a separate 'mobile'
version of a front page (like we used to do for javascript) and still pass
Google's requirements?
Last, that Joe Dever quote made me realize it's been 16 years. I just got
my 11yr old son to start playing through them. :D
nickj
On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Jonathan Blake <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I took a few minutes this morning to do a quick mockup of ideas that have
been rattling around in my head for a website redesign. I don't know when
we'd be in a good position to do a redesign, but just wanted to get my
ideas down on virtual paper.
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/jonathan/website-redesign/project-aon-website-redesign-0.png
Keep in mind that this is just an image, not a live web page.
Google is kind of forcing our hand. Our current design isn't mobile
friendly according to Google (I can see their point), so our search ranking
will suffer.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/11/helping-users-find-mobile-friendly-pages.html
More importantly, people visiting on small screens don't have a great
experience, so it would be best to fix that.
Thoughts about mobile-friendliness or about the mockup?
--
Jon
