On May 14, 3:33 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A while ago we had a huge thread on sage-devel with lots of criticism
> that I dutifly
> listened to which resulted in the current sagemath.org frontpage. Every
> sentence of the current sagemath.org page got carefully written and rewritten
> numerous times based on *your* feedback.
>
> Recently I asked Harald Schilly to spend some time and create a new
> fresh website design for Sage. His new design is here:
>
> http://lite.sagemath.org/
>
> It rocks! It just looks modern.
> William Stein
> Associate Professor of Mathematics
> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org
* Since it's supposed to be a completely new web page, I would start
designing for XHTML 1.0 Strict and not XHTML 1.0 Transitional. If
nothing else, it gives the impression you take coding quality
seriously and are not sloppy, which is the last thing one needs in
maths software. Transitional is a more sloppy version of the standard,
intended for conversion of sites. Of course if that is all your
software can produce, it might be more of an issue.
* Too blue - everyone seems to agree on that.
* German mirror does not work.
* All mirrors have the city and country except Germany, which only has
the country.
* I would add sage is available free. Unix people know open-source
normally means free, but a lot of other people probably do not. People
will often search for 'free maths software' or similar.
* I would replace "Intro" with "Introduction". Non-English speakers
might have more problems with Intro, as it not a word.
* I would add a screenshots page
* I personally think the logo is very bland - compare that to the
'spiky' of Mathematica 6 for example. What is most impressive?
* I would replace "fuses" with "combines". The former is not often
used in English and I suspect might be less well known to those whose
first language is not English.
* It is not necessary to have the word 'language' twice in "Its main
interaction language is based on the very popular Python language." I
would drop the last word.
* In the sentance "You can use Sage via a graphical notebook interface
in a web-browser, or via a feature-rich command line interface, or as
a library in a Python program or embedded into a LaTeX document." I
would add links to screen shots showing the graphical interface, the
web browser, and the command line interface. It's not obvious what you
can embed in a LaTeX document.
* Can sage be accessed from a PDA? I managed to get a web based
interface to Mathematica from a PDA http://witm.sourceforge.net/pda.php
If Sage can do the same, it would be worth adding it can be accessed
via a PDA, or even a phone if possible. Then put a link to a screen
shot. There is most definately a use for maths software on devices
smaller than laptops.
* I would add 'free' as one of the key words in the XHTML header too.
* "Extern" looks out of place. The page is taking so long to load, so
I don't know what it is anyway.
* The page looks rather bland to me. Compare it to
http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html for example. I
realise Wolfram Reserach has a big budget for web site design, but
perhaps you could use some of their ideas. A nice logo. link to
documentation. It just seems bland.
* You could do worst than ask for a critical review on
uk.net.web.authoring A lot of web designers hang out there. The fact
it is not a UK site will not bother them. 95% of the newsgroup is not
uk based. If you want i could put a post.
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