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(Most of the following consists of niggles. This will give the impression that I think worse of the site than I actually do. Sorry.) The message sent by the de

by gjm11 17y ago

(Most of the following consists of niggles. This will give the impression that I think worse of the site than I actually do. Sorry.) The message sent by the design has changed from "Absolutely no effort has gone into designing this; I have other priorities" (see also, e.g., Craigslist, Drudge Report, useit.com) to "I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement. Purely superficial visual-stylistic remarks (important note: I am not a graphic designer or anything; and I've looked at your pages using exactly one web browser on exactly one machine): I think there are too many rules (mostly box borders), which are too prominent and too close to one another and to the text. And, generally, not enough whitespace. I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart, putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges, and changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content) and I think it was a definite improvement. They still look, well, awfully boxy, but changing that would mean a pile more work. The hover highlighting for your navigation sidebar would be greatly improved, I think, by changing the background (e.g., to the same as for a.current -- that "doesn't work" for the link representing the current page, but that may be a feature rather than a bug) instead of adding a border. The majority of commercial websites seem to use sans-serif faces for most of their text. I like serifs :-), but there is something to the argument that they don't work well on the crappy low-resolution monitors we all have to put up with and you might find that, say, adding font-family: sans-serif and (something like) line-height: 140% to div.box gives a more "professional" look. You may or may not care about this. For some reason, I find that reducing the contrast just a bit (color: #333; you wouldn't want this for the headings) also has this effect. This may all just be because any change away from default settings produces the impression that more effort has gone into the design, or something. Marginally less superficial comments: On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links. In addition to not being a graphic designer, I am also not a lawyer; but I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement. Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page. On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30). On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something. On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links. It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page. (Especially on the accounts page, which has forms on it.) You might consider some AJAXy nonsense to avoid this, but it's probably about ten times more trouble than it's worth.

cperciva 17y ago
"I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement. Ouch! Thanks for the honesty, though. :-) I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart I'll meet you half-way -- a 2em gap looks too big to my eye, but I like 1.5em more than the original 1em. putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges Oops! I didn't realize that this wasn't uniform. changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content) That looks a bit too weak to my eye, but I agree on the principle -- I've dropped them to #555 and #aaa. The hover highlighting [...] I spent an obscene amount of time trying to decide what I wanted to do there -- changing the background was the first idea I had, but I couldn't get it to look a way I liked. I think I'll have to come back to this once I've gotten away from looking at that menu for a while. ...sans-serif faces... Sigh. I hate the idea of specifying fonts in web pages... why can't web browsers just pick a reasonable default? But you're right, it does look much better with sans-serif -- consider it changed. ... reducing the contrast just a bit... Lowered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text (maybe this is just a personal thing -- but I'd like to be able to look at my website without wincing), so I've done this using an off-white background instead. On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links. I considered that, but there's nothing sensible to make them link to -- I have pages about portsnap and FreeBSD Update on my personal site, but they are several years out of date. I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement. My law student friends tell me that this isn't a problem; and it doesn't matter anyway since I really don't care if the explanations are somehow interpreted as part of the terms. Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page. Good point, I didn't realize how many parenthetical remarks I was making when I wrote that text. On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30). Oops! On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something. Is it not true? I can't think of any non-random access memory which is addressed in the same way as RAM is. On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links. Good idea. It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page. Those links should be opening up in a new window -- aren't they? That's what happens in my web browser, but it's entirely possible that I did something non-portable. Thanks for all the excellent suggestions -- this is exactly the sort of comment I was hoping to get here. I'm not necessarily going to follow all of your suggestions, but even those I'm not following have provided very useful food for thought.

by gjm11 17y ago

cperciva 17y ago

"I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement. Ouch! Thanks for the honesty, though. :-) I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart I'll meet you half-way -- a 2em gap looks too big to my eye, but I like 1.5em more than the original 1em. putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges Oops! I didn't realize that this wasn't uniform. changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content) That looks a bit too weak to my eye, but I agree on the principle -- I've dropped them to #555 and #aaa. The hover highlighting [...] I spent an obscene amount of time trying to decide what I wanted to do there -- changing the background was the first idea I had, but I couldn't get it to look a way I liked. I think I'll have to come back to this once I've gotten away from looking at that menu for a while. ...sans-serif faces... Sigh. I hate the idea of specifying fonts in web pages... why can't web browsers just pick a reasonable default? But you're right, it does look much better with sans-serif -- consider it changed. ... reducing the contrast just a bit... Lowered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text (maybe this is just a personal thing -- but I'd like to be able to look at my website without wincing), so I've done this using an off-white background instead. On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links. I considered that, but there's nothing sensible to make them link to -- I have pages about portsnap and FreeBSD Update on my personal site, but they are several years out of date. I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement. My law student friends tell me that this isn't a problem; and it doesn't matter anyway since I really don't care if the explanations are somehow interpreted as part of the terms. Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page. Good point, I didn't realize how many parenthetical remarks I was making when I wrote that text. On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30). Oops! On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something. Is it not true? I can't think of any non-random access memory which is addressed in the same way as RAM is. On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links. Good idea. It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page. Those links should be opening up in a new window -- aren't they? That's what happens in my web browser, but it's entirely possible that I did something non-portable. Thanks for all the excellent suggestions -- this is exactly the sort of comment I was hoping to get here. I'm not necessarily going to follow all of your suggestions, but even those I'm not following have provided very useful food for thought.