[sword-devel] New SWORD website - update

[Chris Little]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>> As I said, I have found a solution with a a inline list which works
>> better on all kinds of screen designs. 
> 
> This is now implemented on www.crosswire.org. The design is a inline
> unordered list with &nbsp in all spaces between words which should not
> wrap - like "the SWORD Project".

NB: That's "The SWORD Project". I know I've seen both capital and 
lowercase initial 't'. I've probably used both myself, but as a title, 
the first letter needs to be capitalized--and it isn't always in the new 
webpages.

The current menu bar works inconsistently. Sometimes it gets styled as a 
menu bar. But more often than not, the initial load results in an 
unordered list, which I think we can all agree looks awful.

> In consequence this will be a single line of menu items on a normal or
> wide screen, but start to wrap into two or more menu lines the narrower
> the screen gets.

This is bad design. Show me another site where a wrapping menu bar is 
considered acceptable. And further, there's no visible separation of 
items as we've always had, short of doing a mouseover, so it's unclear 
on my iPhone whether Home & About are two menu items or a single wrapped 
Home About item.

The difference, in large part, is that we HAD a controlled and 
consistent 2-line appearance. And now we have an uncontrolled, 
inconsistent appearance. Inconsistent appearance across browsers is 
something all web designers avoid, which means we're going backwards.

But the crux of this all is that you have admitted to not having much 
design sense, but you've seen fit to replace designs produced by people 
who DO have design sense and design training.

I've said before that I appreciate much of the revamp you've done on the 
CrossWire site (everything under the menu bar & right of the sidebar is 
great) and I think the module download page is certainly on the right 
track, functionally speaking. But I feel the redesign aspects of this 
endeavor are taking a site that was attractive and functional and making 
it less so.

--Chris