16 Sep
2020
16 Sep
'20
2:24 p.m.
I designed the
site in 2014. The style was rather retro even then.
Most of it is hand-coded PHP+CSS. There is no content management
system driving it, but since it isn't usually touched by
non-programmers, this hasn't been an issue as far as I know.
Mobile browsing wasn't as ubiquitous in 2014 as it has since become.
I still don't own a smartphone. Based on what I know of how the
interfaces work, I would guess that the main usability problem with the
current design is the lack of enough padding around the nav links for
them to work well with a touch interface. This was discussed a bit at
the time, but everyone agreed that we were targetting the website at
desktops. Alas, this is no longer a safe assumption.
For me, I don't see a problem in the size of the space around the links,
but in the fact that mobile devices are portrait by default, which means
that there is little room for content next to the menu, which takes up a
fixed space on the left.
For example, in the current basic wiki style, it's nice that when viewed on
a mobile => on a narrow screen, the menu is at the bottom instead of on
the left. Something like that would be enough for me. Maybe there will be
some more ideas.
The best
way of dealing with the menu crowding is probably to add
some kind of slide-out
functionality for Javascript-equipped browsers.
Or we could take the opportunity to redesign from scratch, but if we're
going to do that, I'd like to know before I get too much deeper into
the guts of MediaWiki's revised skinning system.
The nav menu
redundancies are due to the headers being links—for
the sake of uniformity, they all had to point somewhere, even when the
destination was a duplicate of another link. The ideal way to remove
the redundancies would be to de-link all of the headers, but that means
adding some small links. Or we could just remove the redundant "Bugs"
and "Wiki" header links and leave the rest.
Removing the separate Bugs and Wiki entries from menu seems good to me.
The one actual *suggestion* I'd like to make
is that we expand the
"CLAs" nav link into something like "License Agreements", because I
had to blink at it for several moments before I was able to figure
out what it was (especially since the top search result is "Conjugated
Linoleic Acids" . . .)
CLA will be a completely separate chapter for discussion - see Project
status report - tasks. Maybe there could then be a Contributing item
instead of CLAs, where there could be instructions on how to contribute
code (TGW), how to contribute translations (TWTW) and so on. The license
agreement could then be one of the related pieces of information.