Scribus Webpage

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tim_occ

Hi there,

who is responsable for the Scribus webpage? I'm asking for two reasons.

1. Someone made a link building on homepage, I think that is not wanted. I found this line:
<div style="position:absolute;left:-1097px;top:-1817px;"> medicinsk uredelighed advokater nj <a href= http://danmarkpillen.com/ >http://danmarkpillen.com/</a> karriere i sundhedsindustrien </div>

2. I would like help to improve the webpage theme.

Scribus is a designer tool, but if I take a look to Scribus' webpage it looks not really professional. Let's make a comparision between others. ;)
Blender: https://www.blender.org/
Krita: https://krita.org/en/
Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/
Synfig: http://www.synfig.org/

Basicly I like the webpage of Blender. It is well structured and has a lot of visual stuff - here you get the right feeling what you can do with the tool.



GarryP

I agree that the scribus.net site doesn't look as visually appealing as those other sites but it's way better than what it looked like before it had a revamp a while ago.

I think the aim was that the site as it currently stands would be the start of something but it seems to have been left behind. For example, this page https://www.scribus.net/category/upcoming-events/ is essentially blank. Even if there are no up-coming events I think it would be nice if it - at least - told people about things happening in Scribus, e.g. IndigoDock, RTL language support etc. If people can see that Scribus is being regularly updated they are more likely to want to give it a try. A lot of people don't bother trying software if it hasn't been updated for a while because they assume that, if no-one is updating it then, there will be no support if it goes wrong. (Has the main developer just left it to die while they get on with something more interesting?)

It would also certainly help potential users if they could see more images of Scribus in action and/or what it can produce. There's a "Made with Scribus" page but I think the site needs to be more up-front showing what Scribus can help people to make. Without wishing to cause offence, the newsletter, book cover and installation guide on that page look very nice but when you look at the kind of images on the other product sites they look a bit "tame". And I mean "tame" from the sense that they aren't dynamic or fun or interest-grabbing. I'll say again, they look nice, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them, but they just don't grab the attention of potential users.

For instance, compare the type of images currently shown on the home pages:
* Blender - Cyborg, cityscape, some kind of Space Station?
* Krita - Manga-style characters, a dragon
* GIMP - A dragon (again) and a woman
* Synfig - More manga-style action characters
* Scribus - Some blokes sitting in what looks like an airport lounge and a printing press

I've cherry-picked the images for effect but I think the idea I'm trying to get over is plain. I know Scribus has got a "no-nonsense professional getting the job done" air about it but so do the other applications mentioned. What the others do though is say "we're doing it professionally, but we can also have fun while doing it". The Scribus website needs to say this too.

Personally I too like the Blender website best out of the ones mentioned. It catches the eye and looks great. Would the Blender Foundation allow the Scribus team to copy and modify their site code perhaps? I don't think it would take much time to make a Scribus version of it. (If I could get a copy of the original resources I could probably even knock something up myself without too much trouble.)

I realise that maintaining the website takes time and effort but once it's set-up there shouldn't really be much work to do other than updating text when things happen and changing some images every now and then to keep it fresh. How often does something happen in the Scribus Universe that needs to be reported? Every few months? Not much maintenance there.

Anyway, long story short, I agree. The website is perfectly nice as it is, but it could be more engaging.

tim_occ

Hi Garry,

I'm not sure if we need a full copy of blender's wordpress theme. I think a basic barebone for Scribus will do the job. I made a quick bootstrap mockup. Based on this it is not hard to create a wordpress theme out of it. (without any fancy plugins). But I will ask the Blender guys if we can reuse the theme. ;)

What did you says about my mockup?

I think we would need page templates for:
- homepage
- posts
- category pages which show linked posts in one view (like, features, news, downloads)

greets
Martin

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GarryP

Hi Martin.

Ah, I didn't realise it was a Wordpress theme. That would make it more awkward I suppose but I don't know anything about how the Scribus site is hosted. I don't have anything to do with it, I'm just concerned - as you are - that it's not getting the right message across.

Your mockup looks great as a starting point. It's clean and "fresh" and is a good way of getting the relevant points to potential users quickly. (I won't mention any small issues I have with it as it's just a mockup.)

Without thinking about it too much, I think the pages could include:
* Home - Pretty much what you've got (but maybe not so much text)
* Features - All of the main features listed (bullet point lists are preferable to paragraphs)
* Showcase - A variety of examples (preferably not a lot of newsletters)
* Downloads - Proper instructions - or links to proper instructions - for all OSes (including warnings about using dev versions)
* Posts - A simple blog list will probably be enough (something that can be easily & quickly edited and maintained)

These pages should, of course, have links where appropriate to the other sites such a the forum, the wiki, etc. Keeping the number of pages down to a reasonable amount will make it easier to maintain which means that someone will be more likely to maintain it.

I'd be wary of putting stuff about colour management on the home page. Most users won't know what it's for, but it should definitely be on the features page. I think the home page should give people a sort of "BANG Oh I want to make me one of those BANG And one of those BANG Oh and I definitely want to try making that too" type of experience.

Things like colour management are great but the average user just wants to make cool stuff they can show to their friends and family first, then they should want to get into the more serious stuff. Draw them in with the cool stuff then keep them hanging around for the more serious features.

Users that want the serious stuff from the start are more likely to read the features list and not be all that bothered about the cool stuff anyway. They'll look to see what it can do before committing to anything so all of the "flash" will be fairly irrelevant to them. Home page - Cool stuff gets them interested, Features page - show them what they're getting.

Anyway, what's you've put together is looking great. It does look like a lot of other websites but that - in my opinion - is a good thing. It's what people are used to seeing so they're already comfortable with the format. Anything weird and they get confused and will move on to something else.

I'm looking forward to seeing more on this but I think it would be wise to wait and see what the team thinks about it. If the website people don't want to change things or the developers don't want it changing or the management don't want to move away from their plan then it's not going to go anywhere.

tim_occ

Hello Garry,

about the content of the homepage I agree with you. My intention behind was to tease some sections, like: about, features and news. The user should get a short impression. I think we should tell a great story on homepage that the user get these "BANG" effect.

In my opinion the homepage should answer following questions:
- what is it?
- for who is it made?
- why should I use it? -> benefit

I like your list of topics (home, features, showcase, downloads and posts). But I think we need some additional topics which give support to the user, like documentation or tutorials and one additional topic to get more contributors for Scribus.

I can imageing something like that:

* Home (no menu item, because of marketing landing page)
* Features
* Download - filter by operating system (auto detection?), separate source code section
* Showcase - a simple gallery
* News - simple blog for release notes, anouncements, started projects, etc.
* Support - a place where user can find help
  - tutorials
  - documentation
  - forum/wiki
* Contribute
  - developer (code contributions, GSoC?)
  - designer (UI, Website, templates?)
  - writer (documentation, wiki)
  - report bugs
  - donations

greets
Martin

GarryP

Yeah, I think we're pretty much on the same page (pardon the pun).

I'm not sure about the "for who is it made" bit. I think a "what can I do with it" kind of automatically selects the people who it's made for. Tell the potential users what they can do with it and either they want to do that sort of thing or they won't.

Or, to try and put it another way: Instead of saying it's for people who want to create professional looking documents, it might be better to say "look, you can make posters and books and magazines and DVD cover inserts and all of that kind of thing". People tend to use whatever software lets them make the sort of thing they want to make rather than a certain sort of person using a certain sort of software. (Fanboys excepted.)

Hmm. That doesn't sound much better but hopefully you can see where I'm coming from.

I like your additions. A Support link page is a definite must-have so I have no problem with that.

A nicely written Contributions page will also be good. There are probably a lot of people out there that want to contribute in some way but they either don't know what needs to be done or they don't feel that they have the skills needed. Most people haven't been part of an open source project before so they don't understand what goes on or what the various roles do.

There's no clear path showing what someone can do to get involved. For instance, say someone has some coding skills and wants to get involved in fixing - or at least tracking down - some bugs. (A good way to learn new coding techniques.) There are no clear instructions on how they can start to do that. There are little bits and bobs scattered around the wiki and other places but a lot of them are out-of-date and none of them are comprehensive.

What people get is (and I'm simplifying for effect):
1. Download Qt. (Reader: What's that? Why do I need it?)
2. Download all of the other stuff you need, which depends on your machine set-up. (Eh? What stuff? From where? How do I know if I've done it right?)
3. Get the code from GitHub. (How? What's this? Which bit do I need? Where should I put it?)
4. Upload when done. (How do I do that? What if I get it wrong?)

Most of the instructions are for people who already have experience of doing this sort of thing. There's nothing that tells people what to do from scratch and holds their hand during the process. There could be some fantastic coders out there who have only worked on their own stuff and have no experience of using all of these tools. It's easy to say RTFM, but unfortunately the reader will just reply "to heck with this, I'm off" and go elsewhere.

Experts generally don't remember what it's like to not know what they know. They don't remember being the person who doesn't know what's going on because what they know seems so basic and simple to them that they can't understand not knowing it. Everyone starts off knowing nothing at all. If you know it then you had to learn it, and that means someone else has to learn it too.

Anyway, rant over, for now. (I'm sure I've said most of this before.)

I think the website could be improved quite considerably but it's all dependant on the "powers that be". If the Scribus team doesn't want the site to change - and that's fair enough, it's their site and they can do with it as they please - then that's how things will have to stay. In my opinion it would be wrong to keep the site as it is but that's just my single opinion among many. There's nothing special about what I think.

a.l.e

for "historical" reasons, the website is one of the last part of the scribus project that i want to get involved with.

so i'll limit my contribution to one single hint:

https://scribus.io

is one of the "community" driven scribus homepages and i don't think that kunda would mind, if you would use it as a playground for creating a working prototype for the scribus home page.

if the team likes the result, they can then take the result and put it on https://scribus.net

tim_occ

Hi together,

Garry, I totally agree with you.
Quote from: GarryP on January 02, 2017, 04:04:07 PM
I think a "what can I do with it" kind of automatically selects the people who it's made for. Tell the potential users what they can do with it and either they want to do that sort of thing or they won't.

Also your comment about the guides for new contributors. I had the same issues as I started to contribute Scribus.

@a.l.e. That would be nice if we would have a playground to setup a prototype for testing and fill content. But at first a theme or layout template can be develop locally. In worst case I can use my own webspace for a public test version. ;)

BTW I got a response from Ton Roosendaal. He sent me a link to the git repository of Blenders wordpress theme. We can reuse the theme or parts of it. I have checked the theme, maybe it is better to create a new theme, because the Blender theme has a lot of hardcoded parts which have to adapt to Scribus.

GarryP

It's really great that you were allowed to use the Blender site code, it shows a real spirit of open source co-operation. A shame that it's a Wordpress theme though.

I'm in agreement with you about using something simpler. If something can be created with just some HTML and CSS (and maybe some LESS/SCSS in the background) then it will be much easier to maintain. Having dependencies on all kinds of frameworks and libraries in the background just makes things more awkward. Minimum use of Javascript will be good too but may be necessary for some nice little effects (as long as it's mostly "hidden" within the framework then that's fine).

Something like Bootstrap should be okay for what's needed. I've not used it myself for anything - except having a bit of a look round to see what it does - but if the HTML can be kept simple it will be easy for someone to make changes.

tim_occ

Blender is using bootstrap and scss files for compiling to CSS too.

However, I think for Scribus we can make it simple too. For my mockup I used http://pingendo.com/. It is a free and nice tool to create mockups with bootstrap. It supports less files and work with plain html and CSS/less. In fact we can easy create different page types (homepage, download page, etc) with this tool and later we port the html to wordpress.

But collaboration is only possible via sharing source files (html, less, images).

tim_occ

I have created a new Git repository for the mockup files and Wordpress theme:

https://github.com/nitramr/scribus-webpage

GarryP

I've never used Pingendo so it will take me some time to get up-to-speed, when I get the time to get to grips with it anyway. It's been installed and it looks fairly simple (fingers crossed).

Good move putting the project onto GitHub. I've got myself a clone and it's looking nice (I like the new black header bar, for instance). I've also put a watch on it so I can keep up-to-date.

This is a great start. Hopefully a lot of people will get involved, even if it's just with suggestions.

One that note: If anyone knows which images to use for examples of work done, or what features should be highlighted, please post your suggestions here. What's needed - in my opinion - are images that will make someone really want to try Scribus and features that show off what Scribus can do. (It's a marketing exercise after all.)

tim_occ

Hi Guys,

Garry an me were working on a prototype for the new web page. Now it is time to share it with you. All files are hosted on a temporary workspace, check it out:
http://scribus.martinreininger.de/

Tell us what you like, what you not like and where we can improve things.

Have in mind it is not the final state, some images has to be replace by better ones and also some contents/links are incomplete. But it's enough to get an idea.

greets,
Martin

utnik

hi garry and martin

your web page looks great!
the link to the bug tracker is a bit hidden. it could be added to the footer.
...and i'm not sure about the header images:

       
  • the index page shows a full screen image on resolutions up to a hight of something like 900px (with standard browser bars...)
    if the browser doesnt show scroll bars, you could miss the content below the image.
  • the other images with a hight of 244px can be called 'standard headers' these days – but they occupy a lot of useful screen space. (at least the content scrolls in front of them, without loosing the navigation while scrolling – much better than many other pages...)
  • what has an airplane cockpit or an empty table to do with dtp?
all in all: good work!

utnik

a.l.e

all in all: a very good proposal!

here some hints from my side:

main page:

- the sponsors on the main page... personally, i would add one sponsor like inkscpae does (but rotating among the sponsors currently listed)
- the main title "Open Source Dekstop \n Publishing"... I would not put Open source in there... I love the "Inskape \n Draw freely" (Open source is important, of course, but the title should not imo contain that; I would probably prefer the word free...)
- the "about scribus" section: focus on what scribus does well, not on the technical part. IMO the whole section should be rewritten to be more "user oriented".

features:

- nicely done but there are a few things i would not write in there... or i would write them a bit differently :-)

download:

nice

learn:

good... there are a few other links that can be added in there...

news:

ok... the weak point... we need people who write news :-)

contribute.

yes.


... and if it does not become *the* scribus webpage i would love this to be a community page for scribus...