[WikiEN-l] wikipedia homepage

[Brion Vibber]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>IMO that is HMTL madness -- WAY too many spurious colors that mean nothing and 
>whose only purpose is to look "purty" in the eyes of the designer.
>
Personally, I find the current English main page to be overly dense; my 
eyes glaze over when I look at it, and I've been here for a year and a 
half. I shudder to think of a newbie's reaction. (Hmm, should we conduct 
usability testing? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.)

The color backgrounds on the selected events and community sections in 
the /Temp page are an improvement, setting off separate sections, but 
it's still a bit of a jumble of links that are hard to tell apart. For 
whatever reason, I find the French front page a little clearer. It's not 
necessarily the backgrounds or the colors; but a few things that look 
nice to me:

* Skips the sea of links of our "selected articles" section. While it's 
certainly useful, it's very hard on the eyes. Several solid lines of 
undifferentiated blue  text, carefully set up to avoid being broken by 
any ragged nasty white space... right at the top, too, so it's the first 
thing a new user tries to read. Ouch!

* A few more important links (for instance, [[Le Bistro]]) are given in 
bold, so the sea of links isn't so flat.

* The header size isn't as distractingly large

* Border and internal padding on the 'community' cell

* the tilde (~) as a spacer instead of (-) gives a little more space 
between links in the category sections. This may help.

Anyway, just thoughts. IANAGD.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)