[RULE] Making the RULE site clearer?

[M. Fioretti]

Speaking of contributing content to the RULE website. Some days ago I
got a message saying, more or less, "the website is very difficult to
use". I answered:

> I have received very similar comments in the recent past. The problem
> is that, like yours, they usually stop right before explaining what is
> exactly that needs simplification. Please let me know in detail, so we
> can fix stuff if needed: links, structure, content of some pages,
> missing sections, more FAQs??


And this is the explanation I got from that gentleman. What do you
think? Should we proceed implementing the changes suggested below?

Ciao,
	Marco

######################################################################
OK, I've took some time to make the precise comments on the site:
1. menus on the left are somewhat strange:
    - selected menu item "jumps" to the top - menu shuffling is kind of
confusing to the people used to standard static menus
    - some menus have submenus expanding below them - this adds another
layer of complexity in the same menu
    - when you go to the screenshot section, same main menu is cut from
original 7 items to the 4 items (other just dissapeared)
    - initialy menu displays with "Docs" item selected and expanded, but if
you select some other item and then "Docs" again you get unexpanded submenu,
clicking "Docs" one more time sometimes expands the submenu and most of the
time not!
     - same menu: when I enter "Docs" section and click "Developers" on the
main part of the page, then the "Docs" menu is expanded, but this time
submenu is displayed below other menu items, not below "Docs" entry

           -> basically this menu system behaves totaly unpredictable
(changing content, rules of behaviour, ...)

2. Screenshot section
    - it takes two clicks to get to the screenshot content, and then you
find some text and not the screenshots
      Even more, in this text you see the links entered as text, and not
like a standard clickable links (I need to copy-paste them in order to see
the images)
                  -> it would be nice to have a thumbnail galery leading to
full size external-site images
    - in the same screenshot section you are giving text links to some RPMs
    - text of this section is constructed as two articles ( Life without
XFree86?  1st&2nd part), but it is very hard to notice since the titles are
not bold

3. SW packages
    - this section is the most confusing, it is just a bunch of links sorted
by the date
       I would expect to have complete listing of whick RPMs are included in
which distro, and then to have some
       description articles. But everything thrown at the heap, kind of
kills the wish to explore.
      Perhaps you can divide this links into the categories: installers,
distro build tools (DAN, ...), other

4. News
     - this section has problems with display in Firefox (on Win2k) - title
on top has strange pink header background (non other section has this) with
some text/links in this header partialy invisible- hidden below "Site Map"
menu

5. Docs
      - this is in my opinon the most important section but suffers from sam
weakness as the rest of the site:
               - content is mostly organised by date, not by categories
               - most of the texts here (and in the site in general) are
just too long or too explanatory, consider
                 using bulleted lists for most of article introductions to
quickly summarize the rest of the text

I hope this will help you to clean up the website

-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

Capitalists all believe in free markets until they have to live in
one.                       M. R. Chapman, "In Search of Stupidity"

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