Re: Moving the LedgerSMB.org website

[Chris Bennett <..hidden..>]

Sounds good to me.

I also agree that some important work needs to be done on the site.
Everyone is already talking about factual errors/out of date stuff.
But I think the actual appearance and usability sucks.

Everything is very bland looking. Obviously, this is accounting
software, not a band's website. But white background with pale blue and
black letters doesn't build any excitement either.
There are many gentle background colors that are more soothing without
creating any visibility problems (which are important issues since many
small to medium size businesses may actually employ older accountants
with reduced vision).

Also, some additional text colors would be helpful to pull elements out
of a long page.
For example, the downloads page has some of the following:
Debian
Ubuntu
RPM
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
Virtual Box

etc

These items are not quickly pulled out by the eye since they are only
set apart by Bold. A larger font and a different color text for that
word only would let someone quickly find their item of interest.

------------------------------------------------------------
This is also present in the first page section:

Download
Installing LedgerSMB
Fedora Installation
Windows Installation Tutorial
News
LedgerSMB 1.3.18 released
LedgerSMB has been accepted into Debian!
LedgerSMB 1.3.17 released
LedgerSMB 1.3.16 has been released.
LedgerSMB 1.3.15 has been released.
User menu
Create account
Log In


-----------------------------------------
I think that the Tutorials are great to highlight, but belong as a
subsection under each OS's section on the page instead.

The News part is worthless on this page, this is a download page
The User Menu should be part of the page header properly and is needed
on every page anyway



Just with this page as an example:

Pleasant background color (light).
Drop left section block completely
Merge user menu contents into header and footer
Move partial download page stuff in block into actual page contents
Larger fonts, better sectioning with useful color cues
Stick any needed "junk" into bottom of page




I also understand why using SourceForge for Official Releases and such
is necessary, but I find using it for any Beta or Development only
releases a pain in the butt.

I would prefer to have a snappier place to quickly get those files,
such as
wget http://hither.thither.yon/devdown/ledgersmb.2.6.01rc.tar.gz

Heck, to keep out bots, you could say that:
the development only download spot is:
http://hither.thither.yon/devdown/
(no indexing allowed)
and the latest rc is ledgersmb.2.6.01rc.tar.gz


Anyway, just my thoughts..

Chris Bennett