Re: Possible tweaks to the appearance of the website

[Urs Liska]

Hi Paul,

thanks for sticking your head into this.
Some comments from my side below.

Am 04.01.2015 um 16:32 schrieb Paul Morris:
> Greetings LilyPond developers,
>
> Over the last few weeks I had some time and found myself experimenting with
> the appearance of the LilyPond website, especially the main navigation
> bars/menus at the top of each page.  You can see a "sketch" of what I've
> come up with at the following URL:
> (Take out the two spaces, inserted here to help prevent web crawlers from
> finding and indexing these temporary pages. A robots.txt file is also in
> place to prevent this.)
>
> http://clairnote.org / lilypond-web-demo/
>
> No big redesign, just some fairly subtle tweaks to the current one. If those
> who make such decisions like what they see, I can submit the changes through
> the proper channels.

I think there is no official entity who makes such decisions. It's 
rather like someone uploading a patch and others objecting against it or 
not. As I experienced changes to the website are expected to raise more 
objections than obscure changes to the code, simply because anybody can 
have an opinion about the topic.

> Let me know what you think.  Some notes follow.
>
> Cheers,
> -Paul
>
>
> Notes:
>
> - Almost all the changes are CSS changes (presentation rather than content).
>
> - I've used CSS gradients instead of background images wherever possible.

Sounds like a good idea.

> This eliminates the need to download 23 background image files, providing
> some small benefit to page load times and server load.  CSS gradients are
> now well supported by browsers, except for IE9 and earlier (which should
> just display a solid color fallback). See:
> http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-gradients
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/linear-gradient
>
> - The gradients of the main nav bar are more subtle, like the gradients in
> other places.

I think this is an improvement. Looks more even and slightly more "modern".
However, when IE <= 9 doesn't support that it's clearly not an option. 
But I think I'd prefere a browser switch over discarding the idea 
altogether.

> - Active headings are a darker shade rather than being a reversed gradient.

This is definitely an improvement. I found that reversed gradient always 
annoying.

> - The second nav bar is simplified to one consistent color, making it
> clearer which is the active heading.

I prefer that too, but the contrast between active and non-active item 
should be more. Probably I'd make the non-active backgrounds a little 
bit lighter.

> - The home page link/heading is "LilyPond" rather than the lily icon. Since
> LilyPond is not a big-budget commercial brand with a well known logo, having
> "LilyPond" here seemed like a good idea.  Also the icon is a bit too tall to
> fit comfortably in the space, and if shrunk for a better fit it would be
> less clear what it is. The width of this link/heading now matches the others
> instead of being smaller.

I'm undecided about that. I wouldn't miss that image too much, but OTOH 
it gives some liveliness to the page header.
Apart from that I'm not sure that "LilyPond" is the right term here. 
"LilyPond" - "Introduction" - "Download" doesn't seem like a natural 
sequence. Actually it's "Home", isn't it?

> - The search box is slightly smaller and light green to give the main nav
> bar a more smooth and solid look.

LGTM.

> - The light-green-to-white fade in the background is in both top left and
> top right corners of the page. Since the site is a centered design this is
> more symmetrical. The white on green diagonal staff is removed for a simpler
> and less distracting look. (This is done with CSS gradients, but ultimately
> images may provide better results in some browsers (e.g. Chrome)).

I think I'd miss the background score here.
The symmetry is a good idea, so maybe we could have some kind of 
continuation on the right hand side, either the end of the same system 
or an example of a different kind of notation.

On my system (Chrome on Linux) the gradients don't look good and show 
quite annoying stripes. So maybe an image would be indeed better here.

Best
Urs

> - The CSS file needs some clean up, since previous code has mostly been
> commented out for now.
>
>
>
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