New look for Arch website?

karol · 2010-05-26 17:57:44

@Julius2
I didn't say it bothers me :-)

@Julius2
And I say the homepage background is violet - similar (but paler) to 'visited links' color - nowhere near the blue 'not-yet-visited links'.

George.Harmony · 2010-05-26 18:03:11

Looks fine to me. I do like the suggestion of showing some of the forum posts somewhere close to the top. If you look at the last news item it is from May 17th (almost nine days) and the one before that is 29 days old. Obviously this does not give a lot of reason to go the the home page and may lead people to think that Arch Linux is not as active as some other sites. We all know that in reality the forums are very active and provide a great deal of information.

Another way to show progress and activity would to be put a date on the package updates. This would also be useful for the regular users so they could go to the front page, see a package they have has been updated and run a system update. Making the home page an even more valuable resource.

Lastly there could be some reference to new wiki's or major updates. This could be incorporated into the latest news items.

As it stands now I very seldom use the front page choosing instead to head straight to the forums. If the front page had more relevant information I would probably use it to access the forums.

As always these are just suggestions and my opinions. I am not suggesting they all be incorporated I am just brainstorming as to how the front page could be improved to show more activity and maybe catch the eye of new users.

Last edited by George.Harmony (2010-05-26 18:04:36)

karol · 2010-05-26 18:18:01

> may lead people to think that Arch Linux is not as active as some other sites
I sincerely hope so.
Looking at http://www.ubuntu.com/ I don't see much going on on their frontpage.

No news = good news. Bugdays and releases are are simple announcements, package updates that require user intervention mean potential problems and that's why they're printed on the frontpage. I use rss and bookmarks so I'm fine w/ whatever is presented on the homepage, because I don't really go there.

Zeist · 2010-05-26 18:35:23

Allan wrote:

Zeist wrote:
I don't know if it is intentional or not, but it looks a little odd to me that the wiki page has a smaller logo and smaller font in the header.
No it does not... Part of the point of this was to use the same logo and css for all headers to make it more consistent.

Interestingly enough it does look different for me on chrome on windows, but not on chromium on linux.

Very strange, but it does indeed seem that it is just for me it happens on one machine. Interestingly enough it happens consistently on that machine and it isn't zoomed out.

Cerebral · 2010-05-26 19:20:53

It's different for me between home (Samsung LCD) and work (Dell LCD). I don't mind either colour though, but also wouldn't mind a lighter colour. I'm an easy-goin' Canuck, after all.

I think the design looks great. Kudos again, Thayer.

Sherwood51 · 2010-05-26 19:24:20

Wow, nice work!
I really like it!

RobbeR49 · 2010-05-26 19:34:04

The background color looks a bit lavender/purple too me also. My take on it is that yes, #eeeeff technically can be called blue, but subjectively a lot of people are going to (and are seeing it) as lavender, and I think having such a low saturation doesn't help.

You've also got to look at it in context: the logo, package search box, header & link fonts are all in the neighborhood of 200 for hue, so why is the background up at 240? It's only going to make it look more purple in comparison.

thayer · 2010-05-26 20:12:23

Cerebral wrote:

It's different for me between home (Samsung LCD) and work (Dell LCD). I don't mind either colour though, but also wouldn't mind a lighter colour. I'm an easy-goin' Canuck, after all.
I think the design looks great. Kudos again, Thayer.

Bah, while I worked quite a bit on the design end, an even bigger thanks goes to Dan McGee for integrating my sloppy git commits into his already-queued changes for the django backend.

I too notice the difference between home and the new office, so some tweaking may still be made.

toofishes · 2010-05-26 20:16:17

thayer wrote:

Cerebral wrote:
It's different for me between home (Samsung LCD) and work (Dell LCD). I don't mind either colour though, but also wouldn't mind a lighter colour. I'm an easy-goin' Canuck, after all.
I think the design looks great. Kudos again, Thayer.
Bah, while I worked quite a bit on the design end, an even bigger thanks goes to Dan McGee for integrating my sloppy git commits into his already-queued changes for the django backend.
I too notice the difference between home and the new office, so some tweaking may still be made.

Hey wait! An impostor! You aren't an armchair web designer! You can't be posting this logical, non-hatred filled text in here!

To everyone else: I challenge you to come up with something 50% as good as the new site. And it can't be just good for you, it needs to be good for everyone. We had this exact same "bah I want mommy the old site was better" BS last time we switched designs, and now here we go again.

Runiq · 2010-05-26 20:36:14

toofishes wrote:

To everyone else: I challenge you to come up with something 50% as good as the new site. And it can't be just good for you, it needs to be good for everyone. We had this exact same "bah I want mommy the old site was better" BS last time we switched designs, and now here we go again.

I lower my head in shame and admit the purple color stems from my LCD's color temperature.

jasonwryan · 2010-05-26 20:38:55

toofishes wrote:

thayer wrote:
Cerebral wrote:
It's different for me between home (Samsung LCD) and work (Dell LCD). I don't mind either colour though, but also wouldn't mind a lighter colour. I'm an easy-goin' Canuck, after all.
I think the design looks great. Kudos again, Thayer.
Bah, while I worked quite a bit on the design end, an even bigger thanks goes to Dan McGee for integrating my sloppy git commits into his already-queued changes for the django backend.
I too notice the difference between home and the new office, so some tweaking may still be made.
Hey wait! An impostor! You aren't an armchair web designer! You can't be posting this logical, non-hatred filled text in here!
To everyone else: I challenge you to come up with something 50% as good as the new site. And it can't be just good for you, it needs to be good for everyone. We had this exact same "bah I want mommy the old site was better" BS last time we switched designs, and now here we go again.

I concur. The irony level in here is almost claustrophobic: a rolling release distro where people are wanting to downgrade to a previous version?

Marcel- · 2010-05-26 20:53:04

If we want to keep everything simple, stupid, why not use a style like:

Cosmin · 2010-05-26 21:12:12

The new design is very nice. Good work guys!

Would be nice to have a gnome theme with these colours

toofishes · 2010-05-26 21:13:27

Marcel- wrote:

If we want to keep everything simple, stupid, why not use a style like:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/464 … f816_m.jpg

I like it!

Oh, and for those who don't remember prior Arch sites, here are flashes of January 2003, January 2006 and January 2007 courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

karol · 2010-05-26 21:16:20

January 2003 - Reversed Slackware Style (tm)?
http://www.slackware.com/

DonVla · 2010-05-26 21:35:27

It's ok, but for my gusto it's too compact (crowded?).
The old layout looked somehow "freer".

PS: ... or maybe "lighter"

Last edited by DonVla (2010-05-26 21:37:42)

hoschi · 2010-05-26 21:44:33

the new design looks very nice.
it is simply "kiss".

MkFly · 2010-05-26 22:25:30

dudko wrote:

I like that new style but I had to change background color to white.
Here is a simple gresemonkey script, which can do it.

While that certainly works, using JavaScript solely to set CSS is, in this case, overkill. Stylish is much better suited for that.

Anikom15 · 2010-05-26 22:28:23

More about color.

You can't calibrate an LCD (in terms of color) because of viewing angle (well you can to an extent, but it's never going to be perfect), the LCD that was pinkish is probably because it has a 6500K temperature. Most LCDs are 7500K or 9300K, even if it says "6500K" it's probably 7500K. I think a good color would be #eef7ff, a light azure. It's very similar to the #e2eeff suggestion, but a bit lighter for readability.

thayer · 2010-05-27 01:59:00

Marcel- wrote:

If we want to keep everything simple, stupid, why not use a style like:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/464 … f816_m.jpg

Now you're talking...oh wait, my site looks like that already: http://cinderwick.ca/

spoonie_aus · 2010-05-27 04:42:16

good job guys keep up the good work

GogglesGuy · 2010-05-27 13:22:06

Prefer the old look. It looked much more professional than the new one. The new one looks more like a hobby website...

Edit: I do like the new "Packages" link. I hate linux distribution websites where it is hard find a list of packages.

Last edited by GogglesGuy (2010-05-27 14:56:41)

Julius2 · 2010-05-27 14:20:35

Prefer the old look. It looked much more professional than the new one. The new one looks more like a hobby website...

I like it. The old one looked dull, it was too plain and it felt that someone just put a few images over the default colour scheme. This feels like a much more unique and 'complete' site design.

combuster · 2010-05-27 14:25:44

Well I don't like it, but it doesn't bother me too much. Not because of the design (its ql btw), just personally I have this bad feeling when I'm on the front page, could be that I'm used to the old design - but then again in a week or two I should get used to the new one

Acecero · 2010-05-27 15:10:46

GogglesGuy wrote:

The new one looks more like a hobby website...

Consider it maybe that Arch is more of a hobby distro?

Anyway, there is a lot of crud that the webdevs want to clean up from the old look. The change is going to happen.

Last edited by Acecero (2010-05-27 15:12:03)

Arch Linux

#126 2010-05-26 17:57:44

Re: New look for Arch website?

#127 2010-05-26 18:03:11

Re: New look for Arch website?

#128 2010-05-26 18:18:01

Re: New look for Arch website?

#129 2010-05-26 18:35:23

Re: New look for Arch website?

#130 2010-05-26 19:20:53

Re: New look for Arch website?

#131 2010-05-26 19:24:20

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#132 2010-05-26 19:34:04

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#133 2010-05-26 20:12:23

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#134 2010-05-26 20:16:17

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#135 2010-05-26 20:36:14

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#136 2010-05-26 20:38:55

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#137 2010-05-26 20:53:04

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#138 2010-05-26 21:12:12

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#139 2010-05-26 21:13:27

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#140 2010-05-26 21:16:20

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#141 2010-05-26 21:35:27

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#143 2010-05-26 22:25:30

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#144 2010-05-26 22:28:23

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#145 2010-05-27 01:59:00

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#146 2010-05-27 04:42:16

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#147 2010-05-27 13:22:06

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#149 2010-05-27 14:25:44

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#150 2010-05-27 15:10:46

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