FreeBSD website redesign...

I noticed immediately big icons, then that the big icons do nothing, then that I saw no links in the text associated to the big icons which do nothing. I read enough of the text associated with the big icons which do nothing to ascertain that, while it wasn't actually dolorem ipsum filler, it seemed mostly unimportant. I noted the dreadful hamburger icon but instead scrolled down to find a link to another page where there was a further link to the FreeBSD Handbook, the object of my curiosity. I'm not a web designer but I know what I like. I like for the bolded Documentation header to be clickable and take me to the documentation. Sorry if the seems negative. For what it's worth I don't use a smart phone so most of these newer design choices are just small annoyances. If y'all like this good on you. I'll do the extra clicks and complain no more.
 
i mean who even is visiting the FreeBSD website from their phone, if you think about it··· i think this was pretty pointless to change too
 
I like these two mockup versions generated by Gemini. I like them both a lot.

Untitled1.jpg
Untitled.jpg
 
mer said:
I personally hate trying to design UI/UX stuff. Not my forte. I can code the backend to give you what happens when you click here, but making it pretty? Nope,
Click to expand...
That's the whole point:
Designing an UI is about functionality and efficiency in usage, not to look pretty.
A functional and efficient in usage UI is automatically pretty, while a primarily designed to be pretty one is not good in funcionality and efficiency, because that was not its primary design task.

But today there is only a very tiny minority who let you even allow you to explain that, because everybody knows what looks cool; must know, 'cause cool looks sell, while functionality and efficiency are just nice terms you may use because they sound so nicely, but actually their true meaning is unkown, and unimportant anyway, because since almost everybody is used to highly ineffecient UIs bad in functionality are standard, almost nobody can judge anymore.

While at the same time, and that's the 🤪 part of it:
True unix lovers prefer terminals for main UI. Those are the most "ugly" to look at UI, so "boring" text only, but they are by far the single most efficient UI in usage offering most functionality (for the most of the tasks at a computer, as long as you don't do some graphical design stuff [even CAD comes way more efficient in usage when using the CLI.])

But explain that even in a society saying they love unix[like] but pushing lots of pressure to drive it more and more to windowslike GUIs, and a foundation not using FreeBSD themselves as primary daily drivers - selling something they are not using themselves to others not knowing what the whole show in it's true core is really all about.

Now watch the shitstorm I receive for this post (my point exactly.)
End of Story.
I have already all said what all I can say to this topic, so I'm out of here.
 
Maturin said:
That's the whole point:
Designing an UI is about functionality and efficiency in usage, not to look pretty.
A functional and efficient in usage UI is automatically pretty, while a primarily designed to be pretty one is not good in funcionality and efficiency, because that was not its primary design task.

But today there is only a very tiny minority who let you even allow you to explain that, because everybody knows what looks cool; must know, 'cause cool looks sell, while functionality and efficiency are just nice terms you may use because they sound so nicely, but actually their true meaning is unkown, and unimportant anyway, because since almost everybody is used to highly ineffecient UIs bad in functionality are standard, almost nobody can judge anymore.

While at the same time, and that's the 🤪 part of it:
True unix lovers prefer terminals for main UI. Those are the most "ugly" to look at UI, so "boring" text only, but they are by far the single most efficient UI in usage offering most functionality (for the most of the tasks at a computer, as long as you don't do some graphical design stuff [even CAD comes way more efficient in usage when using the CLI.])

But explain that even in a society saying they love unix[like] but pushing lots of pressure to drive it more and more to windowslike GUIs, and a foundation not using FreeBSD themselves as primary daily drivers - selling something they are not using themselves to others not knowing what the whole show in it's true core is really all about.

Now watch the shitstorm I receive for this post (my point exactly.)
End of Story.
I have already all said what all I can say to this topic, so I'm out of here.
Click to expand...
I have a (correction)10.1" SW3-013(/correction) tablet it's an Acer but the baytrail graphics aren't supported so it's now my freebsd 15 terminal for my backpack.

Anyway, checking the new website design in chawan, renders very clean in the terminal. No hamburger menu, bottom navigation working nicely. Looking good in the tui.

EDIT: Just logged into the forum with chawan and things render nicely here too. 😁👍

Oh just another note on chawan. I did have to create ~/.chawan/config.toml and enable JavaScript and cookies for the forum to work properly.

Code: 
scripting = true
cookies = true
 
mer said:
I'm using waterfox; it seems to be a size related issue. If the horizontal dimension is less than about 970 you get the hamburger, above that you get the old style menu.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's a media query. At a certain pixel size it uses the menu bars style. You can right click inspect and disable the menu bar checkbox or change max-width to min-width or whatever you want to change. I think it's set at a max-width 1300 so anything below that on the horizontal uses the menu bars style. The only alternative is using browser/os detection to select the style. And that will just ask your browsers user agent information. They chose to go with CSS purely rather than JavaScript or another method. I think that's a good call.

EDIT: The site was created using Hugo. I hadn't looked at the source till now. That's cool. So, good call to the Hugo project.

EDIT again: There are some code errors here. The header for li class title in the hamburger is closed after the link to "get freebsd" that's why there is no link to the downloads page. It hidden in the li tag.

Unreal, should add that to their Todo list of things to fix. It's on line 119 should be moved to line 118. Yeah, code review please...

No no that's wrong wait not familiar with their classes the class title should be stripped from line 117. Yeah because that class is not a link. Sheesh

And it's a consistent error in every sub menu....

Ok... I gotta suggest just starting over with a blank document from scratch. Just write the pages. No offense to Hugo but what is that?!?

The open graph title and description are blank also. And Hugo leaves blank spaces for no reason. Meta description and keywords are also blank. That's just wasting kb. And the design links to off-site JavaScript hosted at plausible.io

Other than that it's a nice page.

I attached the offsite plausible.io script in text format if anyone is curious. It tracks downloads and files accessed etc. It's an analytics script.
 

Attachments

JohnK said:
question to the nay-sayers (or possibly food for thought): how does it compare to yours?
Click to expand...

I think the question is misplaced, every user has right to complain about the product or the service regardless of his background.
Especially when the changes are purely cosmetic.

I get your angle tho, but I don't think it's applicable here, we're not dunning-krougering, rest assured I am able to create websites, designs and I'm sure many others that have negative opinion can also do so...those that maybe can't, can use an LLM to produce any sort of website template. Therefore technical prowess is not the factor here, so the design cannot be hidden behind technical complexity, with the "excuse" for the, in our opinion, badly designed site, being that layman cannot see hidden layers and are using a simplistic view of the situation. We aren't. I don't like scrolling sites, many people don't like them, it is the latest fad on the web. I find those sites being advertisement/propaganda first, and information source second.

FreeBSD website is of course not transforming to such a thing, but why even use that design language? On my 3000x something desktop monitor when I accessed the web, I saw all the information - the news, the releases, the sections, everything on one click. Now, I see FreeBSD propaganda - a huge logo, and some statement about "powerful OS".

Sometimes people are just different, and sometimes, one is right and the other is wrong.
For contemporary software, it is better to have a site designed in 2005 than 2025. It means the project is active for decades.
The new FreeBSD web site index page, looks more like one of a hundred thousand 'modern' software projects that have confused an off the shelf product box for a website...it does this, it does that, for really cheap, even unclogs your toilet.
 
I see what others are saying about design issues. I'm on vacation and can only look at my phone.

A number of years ago I had offered to have the people at my Web dev company look at a redesign but from what we were told we thought it was more work than we had time for. Later, when we were closing things down, guys were less interested in working on it for free. I now regret not spending more time looking at it and let my guys tinker.
 
Maturin said:
True unix lovers prefer terminals for main UI. Those are the most "ugly" to look at UI, so "boring" text only, but they are by far the single most efficient UI in usage offering most functionality (for the most of the tasks at a computer, as long as you don't do some graphical design stuff [even CAD comes way more efficient in usage when using the CLI.])
Click to expand...

I know you said you are logging off from discussion, but I just want to respond, be careful about presuming the use cases.

GUI is definitely not just for graphical design stuff. There are hundreds of GUI applications on FreeBSD/UNIX I mean real world applications not software packages. Any kind of multimedia production. Any kind of office work. Any kind of web work in the end requires a full browser. Any kind of real world workflow is going to probably be better supported on a GUI, like filling out a form or reading/signing a PDF.

Microsoft made Windows as answer to early GUI shells available for home, cheaper computers like Apple.
The GUI paradigms used were actually created in 70s mostly by Xerox.
It is not only the 'consumer' software companies that ripped them off, UNIX vendors did too. Sun Microsystems, probably the biggest, had graphical user interfaces on UNIX since the early 80s.

In order to compete with Sun, Microsoft had to produce Windows NT. A true professional OS, but with a graphics shell Windows had. It wasn't "here is a server OS, but with a GUI!", but "here is a server/workstation OS for the PC platform", as UNIX vendors like Sun already set the standard of UNIX workstation having a GUI capability.

This is kind of offtopic, but if you presume the Unix purity is the terminal, then it is implied the big UNIX vendors like Sun strayed away from it just like Linux does today. All of them tried to sell their OS, like SunOS/Solaris, Irix, HP-UX as a general purpose workstation. Meaning the person operating it doesn't need to be a Unix expert but a basic user in a sense of DOS/Windows basic users that know where the files and where to click on something to get to somewhere. They ran business software, CAD/CAM, multimedia authoring, photo suites, math suites, physics simulators, electronic design aid software etc, do you really think users used that from CLI? Of course they didn't, they'd log in, click somewhere to open their application and work on their stuff.

This is the direction UNIX was turned to through the 80s and 90s by the entities legally able to use the UNIX trademark.
Big iron - server - console. Desktop - workstation - GUI.
 
I've thought of a way to make everyone happy. Remake the entire page in cutting edge Macromedia Flash (TM) and it can play a nice .mid midi music file in the background with an animated cursor that makes a bubbly sound when you make a selection. That's just the front page. All other pages should be in tables but the midi track follows you to every page in an iframe. This will be amazing. GeoCities won't hold a candle.

I wanna party like it's 1999.
 
The new design looks fit better for smartphones.
I somtimes see "Sent from my iphone" among official mailing lists.
So at least some developers may be reading official web site on smartphones when away from keyboards.
In my humble opinion, it may be one of the motivations for re-designing.
 
T-Aoki said:
The new design looks fit better for smartphones.
I somtimes see "Sent from my iphone" among official mailing lists.
So at least some developers may be reading official web site on smartphones when away from keyboards.
In my humble opinion, it may be one of the motivations for re-designing.
Click to expand...
Agree, using the previous version on my phone was a pain (the menus were expecting you to be on a desktop so selecting a menu and then another option was more hard work that it was required).
 
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