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Red Hat Software Businesses

redhat.com Site Redesigned 155

Posted by CmdrTaco from the new-and-improved dept.
Joseph writes "Red Hat looks like it put those Atomic Vision folks to work with a new site design. More hype before their IPO?" I'm just glad to see a simpler, more elegant design.
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redhat.com Site Redesigned More

redhat.com Site Redesigned

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  • RedHat: capitalist pig-dogs (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With this latest manuver, those guys have completely SOLD OUT. DEATH TO RED HAT!!! We must fight them at the FTP servers, we must confront them in the mailing lists, we will never surrender!!!!


    Of course, my anger at RedHat might have something to do with my having missed out on the IPO. Dammit.
  • I'm having a real hard time imagining why anyone would want to run a web browser any wider than 800 pixels anyway

    My default size is 800x880, but occasionally I'll make a window a bit wider than that.

    But, speaking as a long-time programmer and a big fan of genericity: it is not the issue how big people's windows are (on average) and/or what one can or cannot imagine that others will want to do (either now or 5 or so years from now). The issue is that when it takes no extra effort at all to get the tables right, there is no reason to get them wrong. Hell, even if it did require some effort, it should still be done right.

    Computers are meant to automate things for us, so why, oh why, do so many of their users, and even so many programers, insist on doing things manually and getting them wrong in the process? Let that stupid piece of silicon take care of things like the layout of WWW pages automatically. That's what it's "good" at, or that's at least what others already have t old it how to do.

    --

  • the ideal length of the line depends on the point size of the characters

    There you have it: hardwiring 600 pixels is not the right thing to do!

    PS: I'm a big fan of TeX. Guess why...

    --

  • Re:Small fonts (Score:3)

    by Brian Knotts ( 855 ) <.moc.sseccaedacsac. .ta. .sttonkb.> on Monday July 26, 1999 @08:32AM (#1783407)
    Yes, the fonts are rather tiny, even with xfstt.

    I can understand using a relatively smaller font for the subcategories, but the proper way to do that is not SIZE=2. It should be SIZE=-1. That way, someone who has limited vision or a high-resolution display can set their fonts to a large size, and the subcategories will still be relatively smaller, but remain large enough to see.

    Absolute font sizing is a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, it is still done quite often.

    --

  • I actually get better font sizes by giving control back to other web sites. Probably something to do with . Which is annoying, especially since for one of my jobs my monitor is constantly about 30 inches away from me (so I need larger fonts all the time). sigh
  • I'm running in 1600x1200 now, and I'm having a real hard time imagining why anyone would want to run a web browser any wider than 800 pixels anyway. Why people maximise a browser window, I will never know. What's the point of having work space at high resolution if you're going to limit yourself to one huge window?
  • Yes, I actively use 10 workspaces through Window Maker, but I use the "maximize" feature about once a week. Reading text in a web browser at 10 points in a window 16 inches wide is almost impossible; my eyes lose the line I'm on in big chunks of text.
  • t really doesn't matter what design rules you follow and how well you follow them, the only thing that matters is this: does it look good or crappy?

    Exactly wrong. Oddly enough, I agree with the rest of the posting, so I wonder if that sentance above is really what you mean.

    The aesthetics do not matter except indirectly. A portal-ish-type-page is not a piece of artwork to be framed and hung and for people to have strong emotional feelings about how beautiful/powerful/sensitive it is. The readability and useability matter.

    If a page looks so ugly that it distracts from usability, that's fine, but I'd much rather visit an ugly-ish useable site than a gorgeous unuseable site any day. The design rules you reject are expressely for the purpose of enhancing readability and usablility. Even at the cost of beauty.

  • I personally think that they "sold out" when they had a portal site, which I find to be an annoying trend.

    I'll be honest, I have a portal for my start page. But, when I want to download the latest version of Netscape's browser, I don't want to search through a list of categories trying to find the one that the browser is under (yeah, I know it's under Netscape, but this is an example, so work with me). The idea of hiding the product seems counterintuitive to me. http://www.netscape.com/netscape should be the home page, and the current home page should be http://portal.netscape.com, http://search.netscape.com, or something like that.

    So, I think the new redhat page is a good thing. I'll admit, I looked only at a few pages. But I do know this, going to the Errata page took half as many "clicks."

  • Re:Just a thought... (Score:5)

    by Joe Patry ( 1448 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @07:48AM (#1783414)
    It looks like other site because its a simple design. Making a site more useful is not selling out, not that a commercial company can sell out... By definition they have already sold out. This redhat bashing is senseless. What have they ever done that is wrong or is against the community. They pay programmers to work on Free Software projects. Those Bastards! They GPL their code. Corporate Sellouts! Oh wait, I know what their fault is.. They're sucessful, and are gaining mainstream acceptance. gasp! So Linux is loosing alitle bit of its mystery and your elitism is being threatened. So sad, you'll have to go find another counterculture OS to identify with. Me, I use it because it works. An OS is not a lifestyle, its a tool.

  • Faster (Score:1)

    by suprax ( 2463 )
    It loads a lot faster but also it dosen't have as much content. Where did all the streams and feeds go. Even though they might have been slow, they were cool as a portal site.

    --
    Scott Miga
  • I think it's better than their last attempt. They were in danger of becoming another useless site like http://www.netscape.com [netscape.com]. At least with Red Hat they've now put the important things back on the front page (like Products, Updates and Errata, for instance).
  • The Slashdot feed is still there, featured on the _first_ line under "News & Views." Why must everyone go apeshit with the conspiracy theories when it concerns Redhat? - "aah! they're offering content! My god they must be trying to kill *our* Slashdot." Guess what - if you consider their page as it is right now a portal, then so is practically every other software company website. Chill.


    Personally I thought plastering Slashdot and Freshmeat headlines on the front page was a bit much anyways. Literally, they accounted for about 25% of the real estate.

  • The teeny tiny absolute font size still looks horrible in Windows, and even in MSIE running in Windows.


  • Why does everyone designing these so-called portal sites insist on setting all their table widths to 600 pixels?

    Because it is easier to read.


    I think you mean "because they think it's easier to read". My point is, of course, that this is an incorrect assumption. Do you know how big my text is? Maybe I've got a really high resolution screen.

    Let's pretend I had a display that was 4096 pixels across. Because I want to be able to read text, my font is set to something that gets roughly 80 charcters per line, or an average width of 51 pixels per character. So almost 12 characters will fit in that 600 pixels. See the problem here?

    Yes, you don't want more than about 70 characters per line. But restricting the number of pixels per line is not the right way to do this. You don't know how big my font is, or what the resolution of my screen is.

    The right thing to do is to either use a 100% width table, or use no table at all. If I have trouble reading your lines because they're too long, I'll make my browser window narrower. Artificially restricting it to a certain number of pictures only ensures that a large portion of your users will never be able to get it to look good on their display.

    If you really want 30-70 characters per row, HTML will need some way of specifying widths in em's. Unfortunately, HTML is currently too brain-dead to do sizes in anything other than percentages or pixels. Using pixel sizes is the wrong thing to do for anything other than raster images.
  • Just because most sites do it, it doesn't mean it's a good thing to do. c|net [cnet.com] used to have fixed table widths as well. Now they don't.

    Putting fixed width tables around your pages tells me one thing: you should be working with paper, not HTML. The web is too powerful for you, and you want to artificially constrain it.

    I am aware that many commercial sites use fixed table widths. That doesn't stop it from being a stupid thing to do.

    Using your logic, all web sites should still be grey, because most web sites were grey initially, and "Consumer's [sic] like what they know."

    Using fixed-width tables around web sites destroys their usability. You can fool yourself all you want, and make up statistics like "99.9999874 users use exactly the same browsing configuration as me", but the fact remains that anyone with a different screen resolution, font, font size, browser, windowing system and/or video card is probably going to see your page differently than you do. Trying to squeeze the page into some lowest common denominator resolution just pisses users off.

    When 4096 pixel wide displays do become commonplace, what are you going to do? change your tables to say 'width=3000'? What about users with 640x480?

    Leave out the constraint, and things will look good on every user's display.
  • right, but the small-fonts trend still sucks. it seems like "professional designers" tend to forget that text in pages is tehre so people can READ it.
  • ..booted back to Linux, and indeed, looks shitty in 4.6. Can be readable with a lot of tweaking.

    Poor font rendering quality is my biggest problem with using X/Linux. Compare writing text in Word or Scientific Workplace with WordPerfect and LyX in Linux. (And yeah, NT4SP5 is more stable on me than X - example? try reading a large mailbox file originally from Pine from Netscape messenger. It freezes X solid. Hard reboot. Repeatable. Yeah THEORETICALLY I can ssh in and kill it. 20 min roundtrip to nearest box. Netscape is a piece of shit as it is)

    Fortunately, I mostly write code, not presetations and fixed font looks fine for that.

    On topic - RedHat better put their money into Mozilla and XFree, than that GNOME doodads.
    Browser and fonts is what people work with -
    it should look as good as NT at least.

  • Memory? (Score:1)

    by Axe ( 11122 )
    I have 512Mb on my Dell. If that's not enough to open a 4M+ text file for Netscape, while pine (!) reads it just fine... NC...Sign..Is it THAT hard to fix?
  • First: Their Slashdot section is still there. It's just behind a link from their front page. But did you ever *really* go to Red Hat's site for Slashdot news? It wasn't updated often enough, it was ugly, and it was slow to load.

    In any case, this really doesn't look like a portal to me. Yes, they do have links to a lot of places, but links do not a portal make. What they *do* make is a good starting point for a newbie. (And a portal would've put Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Linux Today on the front page.)

    When I had just gotten into Linux (two years ago! How both long and short that seems!), the one thing I was starving for was a way to find other Linux sites. It took me until the Mozilla launch in April '98 to find out that Slashdot even existed. And I was the first out of any of my friends.

    Yes, Linux.com does a good job already. Yes, there are other portals. But c'mon. Isn't that what Open Source is all about? Don't trust any service of block of information to only a single provider. Hell, that's what Slashdot's all about, if you ask me.
  • I agree, it needs some flashier colors in my opinion. The whole canary yellow thing is just nasty looking. The Red is a must have considering the name but not yellow..
  • The last revision was ugly. Looked like it was put together by a 5 year old, shoving everything in where it didn't belong. Nice one this time.
  • Well at least I can _use_ the site on my 640x480 LCD Thinkpad Laptop. I hate sites that _assume_ 800x600 or higher. (My printer does not like them ether)

    I make all my stuff resizeable layers. Not that hard to do. (What's HTML anyway? ;P)
  • Whoa. Just for the hell of it I typed it in. I was not expecting much, after all, I'm currently using IE 5.0.

    I got a (blank?) blue screen that in the title bar says:
    res://mshtml.dll/about.moz

    Easter egg? Subliminal message?
    For some reason it's freaking me out.
    Maybe if I set security to low... aiiiieee!

    GPF
  • Anyhow, this whole "portal" strategy doesn't sound like a big winner, especially if that's their front door. At a first glance, it looks marginally more useful to those looking for "HOWTOS" etc. than Linux.com or org's which are "news and views" oriented.

    Funny thing is, I went to Red Hat this morning looking for particular HOWTO (built my first Linux box on the weekend, YAY) and the link to the HOWTO within their mirror was broken. I like site updates which improve the looks of the site (and at first glance RH's isn't bad) but I hate when they make the front page look all pretty and don't fix the links deeper down. Grr.

  • Seriously. If you care to notice, these font-readability complaints are almost exclusively from Netscape users, usually using a *nix version. Stick a fork in Netscape already, okay? Your web browsing will be much less stressful. The page's default fonts look just find under IE5 and Win2K/NT4.

    Now, I admit that I haven't tried Internet Explorer on Solaris since the somewhat shaky version 4 debut (I pretty much only use my SPARC box as a server anymore), but given the ass-kicking that Netscape's taken on the Windows and Mac platforms, surely version IE5's gotta be better than what Netscape's shovelling out, right?

    As for the new RedHat site, I can't say that I'm all that fond of it -- from those flags, which seem a little silly to me, to that unattractive yellow background for the buzz section. My biggest complaint, though, is that there's just way too much red. I really (really!) felt like I was looking at a Chairman Mao advocacy website or something. Then there is the Yahoo-ish table of links -- a stale, sterile look I've never really liked.

    Of course, it's just a website, and I'm sure that someone out there liked the look or they wouldn't have done it that way. So for all of you screaming that this is the end of the world and that RedHat's evil incarnate for their changes, get a little perspective on life already.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • 1280x1024 ~2%
    1024x768 ~24%
    800x600 ~55%
    640x480 ~14%
    Others ~3%

    Source: StatMarket for July 25, 1999 So basically, you're talking about disregarding about 14 percent of the web surfers.

  • [Sorry, had a mouse spasm with that last post and hit Submit instead of Preview. Whoa!]

    1280x1024: ~2%
    1024x768: ~24%
    800x600: ~55%
    640x480: ~14%
    Others: ~3%

    Source: StatMarket for July 25, 1999

    So basically, you're talking about disregarding about 14 percent of the web surfers.

    Then again, since Windows users make up more than 90 percent of the web viewing audience, who cares about that paltry less-than-10-percent who aren't using Windows? Why bother keeping things readable for those people when there are such a relative few?

    Hmmmmmmmm? :-)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • I make a point of having small fonts on my box to make room for lotsa stuff.
    Red Hat uses small fonts to make room for space???
    Hard to navigate, no appeal to the siple style. Let's just say that I hope they didn't pay a lot for this design ;-)
  • I hope this is just a transitional page as they prepare for a major change


  • Why.. it looks.. yes.. it looks like.... a PORTAL...



    Doing my best to fuel the insane portal mania
    Does anybody other than mom and pop on the 'Net for the first time actually use a friggin "portal"?
  • Boy, am I getting bone tired of mustard and light yellow on Web sites. But we're stuck with seeing those colors on big web sites for a while. There's a reason we keep seeing that combo.

    Ideally, Web sites have to be sensitive to users of 256-color bit depths on monitors/laptops etc., even in 1999. The cube/palette holds colors that are equally spaced apart (mathematically) to best represent all visible colors. This helps people with 256-color bit depths set. Don't quote me, but I think the "cube" was done first by Netscape (heard that at a Macromedia user group once-the cube is a best intersection of the different 256-color palettes of Windows and Macs).

    If a color falls outside this palette, it gets re-mapped by the browser to the nearest "cube" equivalent. In the case of a real light non-cube color like champagne, it gets mapped to a nasty salmon color on 256-color monitors.

    I've noticed the problem is the cube is very sparse on attractive, light colors. It's heavy on the dark colors. Despite the even mathematical spacing, in the dark range, there are a half dozen dark dark greens that are indistinguishable from each other. But at the light end, the light yellows are hugely different. Which gives us only a few "palatable" light colors.

    The 256 color palettes of the aforementioned OS's needed to be designed with a greater representation of light than dark colors from the get go. We're paying for this lack of foresight with the way way overused mustard.
  • what happened to their portal site that they released a few months ago? that was semi-useful!

    oh well, back to using /. for my homepage. (either that, or about:blank)
  • Most of You don't seem to know, but:
    HTML is a Markup Language, not a Formatting Language. HTML was never meant, nor is it designed to do formatting.
    Pages should be designed flexible and adapt to whatever screen/resolution (this includes also number of colors/color depth, not only size in pixels) and software/fonts the user has (this includes browser model/version, type and number of fonts - there are lynx users on a text-only monitor as well!)...

    All html-designers requiring 800*600, at least 256 colors, MSIE 4.0 or higher, ... did miss the point. They aren't real html-designers. They are simply designers and haven't really understood what html is for, and how it should be used.

    Only those who use HTML for and how it isn't meant for, have trouble. I don't. I feel well with HTML.

    There are other formats for real page formatting.

    :-)
    ms

  • I thought the Slashdot feed was kind of corny actually. I mean, if I want Slashdot, I'll just go here. But it seems like a real sign that they're gearing up to be a competitor with Slashdot as a "portal site." The thing is, I don't see anything interesting on their site that would make them a portal. Everything seems to be internal information. If this is what their final portal is going to be, it really stinks.

    What is a portal, anyway? A site that gets a lot of people visit, or a site that a lot of people visit regularly? I mean, if millions of people go there one time, it's not going to be a portal. They'll need to add some news or something that actually changes on a daily/hourly basis if they want to attract hits. I mean, I don't think Microsoft.com or Apple.com is a portal.
  • My big gripe is that if Redhat wants to be the leader in the whole Linux/open source movement, well the should look the part.

    OK, so I have no idea what this means. I have no idea whether it was intended to mean anything. Do you mean that Redhat should have taken design cues from the people at w3.org, the leader of the whole w3 standards movement? From apache.org, the leader of the whole open source web server movement? I wish they'd taken those cues a little more to heart, actually.

    Blazing fast the site maybe, but will anyone stick around to find the info they want without a little eye candy? I doubt it.

    I'd have gone with less eye candy, larger fonts, and no animated third party logos myself. Actually, I would have gone one better than that, and allowed users to customize their view of the site.

    Return visitors will be hard pressed to see a change in the content within the golden 5 second window. after complete load)

    I'm not quite so sure about that. The stuff that you would expect to change the fastest ("The Buzz"...gag) is at the top. I would have preferred the "sidebar" thing on the right to be at the bottom of the page. This would have also enabled them to make the search box big enough not to scroll text.

    But I'll actually go further than that. If this is supposed to be the Linux portal of all portals, shouldn't the search box be at the very top? So I can go to the site, type "apache update" and see the real goods? I don't know about you, but I spend more time at sites where I can get information quickly and easily than at sites where I'm forced to wait ten seconds to see whether that last dorky image has content on it or not.

  • I'm running in 1600x1200 now, and I'm having a real hard time imagining why anyone would want to run a web browser any wider than 800 pixels anyway.

    One answer is to get really huge fonts. Another answer is to follow your stock portfolio in Yahoo more easily. :-)

    Why people maximise a browser window, I will never know. What's the point of having work space at high resolution if you're going to limit yourself to one huge window?

    I'm not sure I understand the fetish for ultra high resolution myself. But I can give a really good reason for maximizing browser windows. Some of us use features of current window managers under X that allow us to have a desktop 3 (or 4) screens wide and 3 screens tall, and we can flip back and forth between them without ever taking our hands off the keyboard. In that kind of a system, there's no particular reason why you can't have three maximized browser windows available at once. I know I do. One's usually a search engine, one is work-connected, and the other is to fire up whatever URL turns up as relevant in my travels.

    King Babar

  • "Under construction"/"optimized for xxxx"/"Best viewed at XXXXxXXXX resolution"/"Get Shockwave--it's worth it" are the marks of a true loser.

    Actually, I always like to see Optimized for Lynx. :-)

    King Babar

  • After quite a bit of consideration over the last few years, I finally decided that it wasn't my job, as a Web site maker, to protect my users from themselves. If someone wants to read 12-point type at 1200 pixels across, it's their eyesight, not mine.

    Doing this freed me of all sorts of other nasty little concerns, too. People with vision problems may have a virtual screen size set intentionally large, and be zoomed in on a small part of it. When I want to use a projection system to show a site to a room full of people, I don't end up with one- and two-word lines or worse--text that makes me scroll horizontally.

    I do, however, prefer to make things that degrade gracefully. If at all possible, I don't require anything to be wider than about 540 pixels (== 72 pixels per inch * 7.5 inches for 0.5" margins when printed). Slashdot, as one other post noted, is a fairly good example of this in practice. When visual arrangement or appearance really is earth-shatteringly important, I use graphics.

    Admittedly, I work mostly on information-intensive sites. I put things on the web because I see a need to share information, not to make an attractive piece of multimedia. Art, it turns out, is often less efficient at conveying important information, even though it might be more fun.

    When my conscience really flares up about destroying people's vision or wasting reams of paper so they can print something they ought to be able to read onscreen, I've been known to include a reminder on text-intensive pages that they're often easier to digest with a narrower window and/or a larger font size.

  • Slashdot is not exactly a paragon of virtue in regards to web design--it's got its strong points (good use of contrast, consistent positioning of navigation, etc.) and weaknesses (smallish type in some spots, addiction to embedded tables...bad Slashdot, no cookie...and lack of polish on the graphics).


    Forgive me for being confused, but why exactly are embedded tables bad? (Please respond by normal e-mail tonyj@cs.umd.edu [mailto])

  • I think that I am bound to be the only one here to agree with you. I think that its stupid the way it looks. Can you say Yahoo! or Lycos (yeah I know, not a portal, but it has that same distinct feel). Maybe a cross betweent the old and new site would suffice.

    ----------

  • But you can always (how does it go, oh yeah) SWITCH BETWEEN THE WINDOWS!!!
  • Typed about:mozilla into IE 5 ...
    Redirected to mozilla.org ...
    Freaky ...

  • I remember when their site turned black. I thought it was cool at first, but quickly grew to dislike it.

    Before it was black it was an excellent design--- two equal columns. News items on the right and links on the left.

    When they went to that slashdot/freshmeat/... "portal" thingy I remember thinking "I hit those sites pretty often, good idea" and then never went back.

    Anybody remember what it looked like before? I distinctly remember the walking red man logo, but can't remember the website too well. Anyway...

  • When MS launched that verdana font, they were advertising it for visibility at 7pt on screen. I notice that it's pretty much all they use on their web pages. I have to admit I like it quite a bit.

    Maybe lucidatyperwriter is the best X font for small sizes.

  • It's a page of links. As far as that goes, it looks fine in lynx. Loads fast, no frames but no real new info either. No complaints from me.

  • Is Redhat taking part in the competition to see who can put the smallest size fonts on the web page as well? Or is there a bug with Netscape Communicator 4.6 font selection? Why are sites so intent on using small size fonts? Even with a 19-inch monitor, on the solaris box I use I've got to set the font to Helvetica size 18 to see clearly...and no I'm not blind :)
  • About the only thing I use RH's site for is to search their mailing list archives. These are really helpful for setting up Alpha linux or getting your PnP sound card to work.

    After the site (archive.redhat.com) was taken down for the upgrade, I logged on today but found: "The Red Hat mailing list archive search is currently unavailable due to the SEC's required "quiet period" associated with the proposed IPO of our stock. The search will be available again as soon as the quiet period is over."

    So, it appears that the SEC forbids posting any useful information about your product during the "quiet period."

    BTW, for anybody who needs info from the lists, the mailing list server still works, and has egrep as a search feature. Of course, there's been no mention of the IPO on the sound card list!

    JMC
  • The 6x6x6 cube is progratically easy to "nearest-neighbor" colors to, since you just drop the lower bits.

    Unfortunately, the eye has different levels of sensitivity to R, G & B, thus all the "wasted" colors in the cube.
  • Dull, dull, boring dull. They need to reload the last iteration of their page. It was cluttered but it had some stank on it. This looks like any other corp. home page, gay. Those so-called designers have dumbed-down a previously exciting place to go. A definite 10 on the boring meter.
  • I can resize my window size to however large I want it. Different font sizes really make these pages annoying, however.

    It's very important to be able to read Slashdot in about 1024 pixels wide, when you're reading comments in nested mode. Comments 4-6 layers deep waste a lot of space on the left side of the browser - I'd hate to read those in a smaller window. I'd spend all my time moving my eyes down lines.

    Besides, the *TABLE* shouldn't be limited in size - the cells inside it should be. It would allow better word wrapping inside the outer cells, typically the ones starved for space as it is.

  • Everyone who thinks that they are a designer should read "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst at least 2 times, or at the very least read this page for Yale's web style manual:
    http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/pages/typogra phy2.html [yale.edu]

    I just looked through that page, a little bit, and while it is well written, they haven't really adapted to the use of the web. Their example pages (well, images of them) are labeled backwards in my opinion. The large rectangular blocks of text with no variation are very hard to read through. The pages with nice breaks and appropriate headers where necessary are much easier to use to find the information I want.

    They've also failed to compensate for the fact that most people will sit further from their monitor than they will hold a book or paper in front of their face. I figure I'm sitting twice as far from this 19" monitor in front of me than I would hold a book or newspaper here. That shows up in the amount of text I can comfortably read on a line. My 21" monitor at home is even farther away.

    Strangely, on the Typography 1 page they make many of the arguments I am making here, but in terms of lower case and uppper case text. Overall patterns are important for keeping track of where you are in the page. I find it hard to read solid blocks of text without paying extra attention to where I am in the block of text. A more varied paragraph doesn't cause me those problems.

  • Table widths? (Score:3)

    by PugMajere ( 32183 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @07:40AM (#1783457) Homepage Journal
    Why does everyone designing these so-called portal sites insist on setting all their table widths to 600 pixels? It's really annoying on those of us who have monitors 17 inches and bigger. I mean, it's stupid to run my SGI monitor in anything less than 1280x1024, so i get to see this itty-bitty table in a massive browser window.

    Folks, the trick is to do then specify everything else in percentages as well. It'll look the same on browsers with windows limited to 600 pixels, but those of us with bigger monitors won't think you're idiots. (Well, at least not as much.)

    >/rant off

  • Yes, Linux.com does a good job already. Yes, there are other portals. But c'mon. Isn't that what Open Source is all about? Don't trust any service of block of information to only a single provider. Hell, that's what Slashdot's all about, if you ask me.

    That's not what I was criticizing; I was mainly worried at the apparent "demotion" of /. on their site. It used to have a much more prominent place.

    The idea of a portal is to have _one_ central place where you get a sampling of info that you can customize to suit you. The "old" Red Hat site (which, oddly, wasn't *that* old) came closer to that goal; now, I have to hunt for the /. link (which is pretty tiny) and don't get any other real info on the same page. Just a huge mass of links.

    And for a while, at least, I *was* using it as a portal, until I realized you could customize /. a lot more. :-)

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • If you really want 30-70 characters per row, HTML will need some way of specifying widths in em's. Unfortunately, HTML is currently too brain-dead to do sizes in anything other than percentages or pixels. Using pixel sizes is the wrong thing to do for anything other than raster images.

    You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head as to why you _must_ often use a fixed width in designing a webpage: fixed-width pixmaps. 99.99% of customers (this is a verifiable statistic, really it is, I swear, really, honest) want their websites to have a consistent look across all platforms and browsers, and they also insist (rightly) that their corporate identity system be preserved. This means following guidelines for positioning logos, type, etc., and in most cases this is only to be done using pixmaps (until Flash becomes a *real* standard...where the hell's Flash for Linux?).

    So you are forced to use fixed-width pixmaps and tables for positioning...which, by extension, forces you to resort to using things like "columns" (like Red Hat does) and fixed widths.

    Admittedly, Red Hat did it in a particularly crappy way...no flexibility at all. But you can't assume that all pages can be made to fit your 4096 pixel screen. It just ain't in the cards.

    Trust me, as a web designer, I can tell you that that ain't gonna work, at least not within reason.

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • This has nothing to do with hard-coding every element size and font-type on your web-page.

    I beg to differ. It has *everything* to do with it. The problem is having things like the logo, logotype, global typography, etc. visible (even dominant) and legible on the page at any resolution, and also preserving things like column widths to maintain legibility (as someone else touched on). But the most important thing is CONSISTENCY. You can't guarantee the customer that the site will look even remotely the same on all browsers (or the imporant ones, at least) if the tables are all totally flexible--or if there are none at all. It's a tradeoff, pure and simple.

    Again, look at slashdot, it looks good and consistent most everywhere

    Slashdot is not exactly a paragon of virtue in regards to web design--it's got its strong points (good use of contrast, consistent positioning of navigation, etc.) and weaknesses (smallish type in some spots, addiction to embedded tables...bad Slashdot, no cookie...and lack of polish on the graphics).

    and it doesn't use Flash

    The reason I referred to Flash is because of scalability. At least with Flash you can guarantee a layout is going to work in practically any size. Too bad it's proprietary...and you can't search or index the text in it...and body copy is damned near illegible in some cases. *sigh*

    I myself don't use Flash unless I have to, mainly because I avoid all plugins and Java if at all possible. I sometimes use JavaScript, but never make it central to the interface--i.e. the site should work with JS or without it.

    Anyways, enough ranting for t'day... :-)

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • Embedded tables are "bad" for the reason that they slow down the rendering speed of the page dramatically. Try it sometime--do the same design with and without embedded tables (i.e. use tables with ALIGN="LEFT" and ALIGN="RIGHT" instead of having them all inside of other tables). It's much faster having each table separate. Sometimes there is no other way, but one should try to avoid it if possible.

    Slashdot uses them to excess. Just look at their code and you'll see what I mean.

    Hope that makes sense...

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • Seems like Red Hat is trying to cut their moorings from the open source/geek/Linux community at large. What's this? No more headlines from Slashdot? Huh?

    I also think the new site is one great big yawn. CmdrTaco may think that it's more simple and elegant, but to me it just looks cheap (sloppy design here and there IMO--what's with the cheesy flags?--and there is such a thing as TOO simple).

    Only advantage I can see to the new site is that it loads hellaciously faster, but I'd like at least a _little_ eye candy.

    Yawn...

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • I can't stand it anymore! Why the f*** do they use such a poor design as many others - my question is: all you people have 800x600 (or maybe 640x480) screen res ? I have seen this on many sites, the pages it's fixed size, no matter the screen res. This is BS! Want to see what make rant? Go to RedHat [redhat.com] with a screen res of 1280x1024 and try the same thing with this site. Go slashdot ! 'nuf said.
  • > At the rate we're going we're gonna have portals >that point to portals that point to more portals

    we have them already -- the top lists of mp3s/warez/porn that link to endless pages of banner ads that promise to give you useful results if you just click through one more page of banner ads.

  • The cluelevel on /. isn't too bad, but it has gotten *much* worse. I remember the ol' days when we didn't have first posters, "RedHat == Microsoft" guys, etc. - rather people who were intelligent and were willing to think and discuss.

    --bdj

  • this looks like a carbon copy of alot of other sites.
    It definitely looks like they were going for the sheek look.... trying to ease in some style to play up the idea that they're "Serving the Linux and Open Source Communities."

    Oh, and, lest we forget, they're "the definitive online destination for the open source community."

    Oh, we're not full of ourselves, are we? Nah...I will admit, change can be good, but I think if I were them, I wouldn't have put some of those lines in there like they did, and I wouldn't have made the font so small, and I wouldn't have...
  • Whatever happened with that Geeks on the Beach contest?

  • /. is right there, only now you have to follow a link. Given that you're a regular here, and that their list of stories was always a little bit old, that shouldn't bug you too much. Anyhow, given the venting that goes on here (myself included =), often of an anti-corporate nature, maybe they don't want to highlight those aspects of Linux. That's their right, and hell (for those thinking "corporate sell-out"), do we really want suits to become hackers? Isn't the point selling them on the viability of non-MS 'solutions'? So pushing /. down off of their front page isn't that bad.

    What, you don't got it bookmarked?

    Agreed that the site is a yawn, it even looks bad in Netscape (on my Linux box; I've engaged in font-deuglification too) -- didn't they look at it for themselves?

    Anyhow, this whole "portal" strategy doesn't sound like a big winner, especially if that's their front door. At a first glance, it looks marginally more useful to those looking for "HOWTOS" etc. than Linux.com or org's which are "news and views" oriented.

    For them to compete, they need to provide something no other site really provides: we already have linux.org, .com and /., combined with those pages to which they provide semi-regular links. A new portal should contribute something new; if they don't have new brilliant ideas, they could at least be more comprehensive than they appear to be right now.

    May your day be sunny, yet cool with a small chance of showers later in the afternoon.

  • I think what we're seeing is that /. is getting more popular, and so more of the flamers are here.

    Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way around it with the way the 'net is structured. i.e. allowing anonymous access/posting by anyone.

    I run a bbs that has international message areas. You have to sign in to read/write to those. Consequently, the signal to noise ratio is much better. Those arguements that do start, tend to get resolved quickly, and without too much flaming.

    Airneil
  • I think that last line was the best thing I've read in this thread. A clear simple design will work better and say more about the quality of what you produce than something like...http://www.shadow-net.com, say...I mean, there's a lot crummier corporate sites out there, believe you me!
  • That's why I wrote the diversity guidelines [perl.com] for HTML creation. I talk about how evil absolute pixels are, and also these epileptic pages.
  • Wow. That site really is bad. I suggest that folks all mail their webmaster about it. I can only read their site via lynx. I don't think they've read the site design [perl.com] guidelines. Alas.
  • Guys, our only hope is to send Redhat mail about this nastiness. Right now, I can't read their site except using lynx, unless I use my hand-written proxy that strips out all the font changes and width stuff. I just sent webmaster@redhat.com [mailto] mail explaining why I couldn't read their site. I also posted them at the admittedly Spartan but functional html design [perl.com] guidlines. I encourage you to do likewise, after your own fashion, of course.
  • I agree full heartedly. It is does not have a 'finished' look and feel. RedHat needs to drop the 100k to get a real designer on staff that understands the principles of design. I re-visited the site after my first post and instead of looking at it with my eyes, I switched to 'Johnny no-knowledge' thinking like an everyday user makes the site even more complex to comprehend. Linux is a geek power toy yes, but there is enough press on the OS some average users are looking into the technology.

    Hey REDHAT, MICROSOFT'S SITE KICKS ASS ON YOURS!!

    They (M$) hire talent that not only knows the tricks of the Web trade but understand things like color theory and the psychology of design. Guess what when I need something from the M$ site I find it easy, and the site gets me to look at other information because it is engaging.

    If Redhat really thinks it can steal market share from M$ then they will have to learn a trick M$ has perfected. Copy the competitions strong points and expand the functionality of the product to become superior. I don't want to start the anti-M$ rants thread here, but everyone must admit that marketing is a key to the Redmond success.

    Redhat better understand this right now and quit letting the mailboy do the graphic and UI design for there biggest asset in today's marketing toolkit.

  • REDHAT Get a DESIGNER, an ARTIST I say (Score:3)

    by Flak ( 55755 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @09:00AM (#1783475) Homepage

    Ok, I am a bias fool, (I am a designer) but the design is not engaging. You get lost very fast as there is no central navigation design. Granted you have the top bar that takes you to the top of the specific section, but it is not effective It really looks to me that Redhat is trying to do a portal of sorts.

    Think about what a portal does. You go to once place and you find links to deep level pages on other sites or with the same network(think go.com [go.com] or msn.com [msn.com] or Netcenter). My big gripe is that if Redhat wants to be the leader in the whole Linux/open source movement, well the should look the part. Blazing fast the site maybe, but will anyone stick around to find the info they want without a little eye candy? I doubt it.

    Return visitors will be hard pressed to see a change in the content within the golden 5 second window. after complete load) My two cents to Redhat buy the services of a company that can take there corporate image and turn it into something that is engaging and meets the basic rules of (web)design.

  • There is something about a wider audience/anonymity that encourages a poorer quality of post. As the usage of the Notes Conferencing system on VAX/VMS dwindled when I was at University (this was 94-95 and Netscape and Word were all that were used by most) it became a funny, interesting centre of debate and humour - you knew (or knew of) all the posters and it policed itself to a large extent. Apparently now it has dwindled to non-existence.

    That said, I am pretty new here and I like it. Better than any newsgroup I've ever been on. Its my most visited site on the web.

    And it has a simple look rather like the new Red Hat site. Although Slashdot is somewhat prettier and has slashboxes and is customisable so it is better.
  • I agree that these 600 pixel width pages are a problem. But either there is something wrong with HTML or with IE and NS. I tried to do the following without success. If someone could explain me the right way to do it (if any) that would be nice.

    I wanted to have a table that would take 80% of a page but with fixed length columns.

    If only the first columns are fixed, you can do several tables, what if a middle one is? Is there any way to fix the length (in pixels) of a middle column, and have the other share the rest of the page in a specified way?

  • 99.99% of customers (this is a verifiable statistic, really it is, I swear, really, honest) want their websites to have a consistent look across all platforms and browsers, and they also insist (rightly) that their corporate identity system be preserved.

    This has nothing to do with hard-coding every element size and font-type on your web-page. It is possible to design a web-site that has a consistent look and identity in all situations, without resorting to hard-coding sizes or using Flash. It just takes more skill and effort. Again, look at slashdot, it looks good and consistent most everywhere (that I know of), and it doesn't use Flash...
  • It really doesn't matter what design rules you follow and how well you follow them, the only thing that matters is this: does it look good or crappy? The redhat site (and all its look-alikes) looks real crappy on my browser, and it seems like it looks crappy on other people's browsers too. You can say that it follows some set of design rules 'till you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact that it looks crappy on my browser (and many others).

    A site like slashdot looks great whether I access it on my laptop at 1280x1024 or on the library PC at 800x600. There is a simple reason why it works: don't hardcode anything. If I like to read text with 30 characters per line or 132 characters per line, I'd like to be the one to make that decision, and I'd like to be the one to configure my browser to display sites in that way, not some pompous old designer who can't see the difference between designing for a glossy magazine and a website.

    I'm intelligent enough to configure my browser with the proper font and window sizes, please don't insult my intelligence by imposing your own standards on me!
  • You have to remember who redhat's target audience is: windows users converting to linux. So, they will be more concerned with how their site looks in windows (and it looks good in windows).

    Most current linux users stick with they're current distro (I've only changed once), so there's not much profit making the site appeal to current linux users.

    It's a sound business move and I respect them for that.

  • I am so tired of seeing sites that are designed with the 640x480 user in mind!!! What ever happened to the good designers who could write flexible HTML that would fill up the screen no matter what the resolution? Not to mention that the text is so small and unreadable that I need a microscope to see what the heck's going on.

    I'd love to see some stats on how many 640x480 vs. 800x600+ users there are out there. I bet the ratio is far in favor of the 800x600 users.

    And what's the deal with every freakin' site on the web turning into a portal. At the rate we're going we're gonna have portals that point to portals that point to more portals and it'll take 50 clicks just to find some real content!

    Don't count on me to be back to RedHat unless I need to get files or something. That new design sucks!!
  • I am not suggesting that we ignore 14% of the web surfers...what I AM suggesting is that we don't devote our attention primarily to those 14% -- we give our attention to all 100% by designing nice, flexible layouts that take the whole screen at any resolution and still look good....not to mention that they are still readable at any resolution as well.
  • Aye, there's actually a pretty high amount of clue on Slashdot, making it a welcome shift from skipping past the headers on the latest OS flamewars in the comp.* hierarchy, and the perpetual spam... {sigh} I remember when even alt.destroy.the.earth was remarkably free of spam, and one could look there and find light-hearted discussions and speculation about a possibly impossible problem. But the level of discourse here is probably due in no small part to moderation; trolls and mass-marketers can find their messages relegated to invisibility faster than cancelbots can patrol Usenet.

    I do like the new RH site, also, since it looks like it'll allow speedy navigation. It seems quite clean that way. Of course, I'm not a web designer, (*very rarely* changing my own pages, for instance), and in fact am a frequent Lynx user :-).
  • Here Here!

    It really is a nice effort if you are going for that MS Frontpage Template look! They've gone from having a so-so site to one that's totally unimaginative! It's BORING! And it looks like they spent $45 to use a FrontPage or Net Objects Fusion Template.

    I look at this site and it doesn't make me think, "Oh gee, this is a cool, dynamic, interesting, cutting edge company." It makes me think, "They obviously have NO web budget. They're either run by idiots or out of someone's garage."

    Just my humble opinion. *shrug*
  • I agree that the site sucks shit through a straw but to call it gay insults homosexuals! Let's watch the lame bigotted remarks, ok?


  • The second website I ever did I coded by hand. It beats the living snot out of all these "professionally done" sites done with Fusion and thousands of tables and graphics.

    Oh Please! I'm a professional and I have always handcoded my sites and they still look great! My biggest gripe is that this Redhat site looks like a Fusion Template!
  • Now we have a lot more immature worthless posts. I hate to post something such as this, it seems rather worthless itself. Just can't help noticing... very unfortunate and saddening. Yeah, this last one being one of them! What does this message have to do with the RedHat redesign?

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