D web site facelift

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-07-02 20:55:33 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> said:

> David Gileadi was kind enough to spend some time redesigning the look 
> of the D web site. A preview of it is up on d-programming-language.org. 
> This isn't about the content, just the look/style/feel.
> 
> Comments welcome.
> 
> Please don't put links to anything other than the front page yet, as 
> the organization may change.

It looks much better than the old one visually, but I have a few first 
impression comments about some things that could be improved:

1. That Google Translation bar that appears at the top of every page 
about one second after it has loaded is distracting from the content. 
Yes I can click the X, or the "turn off" button, but having all the 
content shift downwards a second after the page has loaded is annoying. 
And the "turn off" button probably won't work after I reset my 
cookies... hum, not even close: I see it doesn't work even if I keep my 
cookies, not sure why. :-/

(Note: this bar probably appears only when the default language for 
your browser/OS isn't English. Also, translation is overrated for a 
programming language website, because when you translate a page, most 
of the code becomes unreadable. It certainly can be useful, but I 
wouldn't promote it too much because the result is really suboptimal.)

2. Why is the Digital Mars logo so big? I realize it's about the same 
size as on the DM website, but because of the dark background it looks 
as if it was the main title of the website, shadowing the "D 
programming language 2.0" which looks like a subtitle. I think DM needs 
to be made a little smaller and somehow leave more room for D, and the 
"D programming language 2.0" below should be made more visible. This is 
D's website, so D should be the one getting the most attention.

3. As other have said, the contrast is suboptimal for the navigation 
menu on the left. As I learned myself when making websites, most 
people's monitors aren't properly calibrated and what looks good one 
one often looks bad on another. So you must account for this when 
choosing the colors.

4. I'd like if some unnecessary margins on some elements were reduced 
or removed. The site looks all squeezed if the window is not wide 
enough. The effect is particularly bad for code samples which have way 
too much margin (perhaps some margin/padding should be expressed in 
percents). Here are three screenshots at the size I generally keep my 
browser window:

http://michelf.com/img/shots/d-website-1.png
http://michelf.com/img/shots/d-website-2.png
http://michelf.com/img/shots/d-website-3.png

(Note: the last one is quite funny if you can read French, but perhaps 
also if you can't.)

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/