[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [sup-talk] New website design for sup - preview

Anirudh Sanjeev (2010-04-11 21:24):
> Hi,
> 
> I took the liberty to give the Sup frontpage a facelift. I re-used some
> creative commons work without much modification to make something that
> looks really good. Please check out the current work in progress here:
> 
> http://anirudhsanjeev.org/temp/supsite/
> 
> I also wrote a detailed guide on getting Sup up and running with Gmail as
> many people aren't able to figure out what exactly to do initially. The
> guide is available in the same page.
> 
> I feel sup is really good and is the only client that scratches my itch.
> I want more people to start using it and feel that an aesthetically
> pleasing website and a better introduction will help convince people sup is
> worth the effort of moving.
> 
> Also, I was under the impression writing a project in ruby and not having a
> really nice website for it is a syntax error :)
> 
> Please provide any feedback about the design and contents.

I am not a user of sup - might try again when 0.12 comes out. But I am
sensitive when it comes to websites, so here goes my feedback.

Why is the original site bad? I think that it provides more information
and takes less vertical space. Only the screenshots could be bigger
(and perhaps 4 instead of 6?).

It looks like what you are proposing is not a new website, but a shift in
targeted audience. You seem to be addressing the naive user, while
forgetting the more technical ones. I would suggest to aim for the middle,
going for the aesthetic looks (or at least matching the style of the
homepage and the wiki), but keeping the technical tongue (is there any
need to change the content of the current website?).

There is this sentence at http://sup.rubyforge.org/:
"
  The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds
  everywhere.
"

And you seem to agree with it in a later mail:
> Perhaps you want to shorten it for the benefit of those who're blindly
> copy-pasting?
> > Then they shouldn't be using sup in the first place :)

But you do contradict yourself and that statement with the proposed
design:
1. Your design doesn't work without javascript:

    * Why would an overview of the features need animation? What does the
      animation give to the user, besides hiding a handful of text?
      Perhaps a feeling that the software in question might have hidden
      features?

2. First 700px of the page show nothing useful, except for a screenshot
   and big letters.

3. Some very useful, even if technical, pieces information has been lost in
   conversion:
   "Handle massive amounts of email."

   "
     The current version of Sup is 0.11, released 2010-03-07. This is a beta
     release. It supports mbox and Maildir mailstores.
   "
   
   "
     you can clone the git repository like so: 
     git clone git://gitorious.org/sup/mainline.git
   "

4. You have replaced the credit to Xapian and RubyMail with the credit to
   the authors of the website :)
  
As for the GMail guide, wouldn't it be very useful in the wiki?

-- 
--  Rogutės Sparnuotos
_______________________________________________
sup-talk mailing list
sup-talk@rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/sup-talk