Launch Day
After much anticipation, I am delighted to finally announce the launch of all the new designs for the CPAN Testers family of websites. Or at least the ones I look after. This is a major step forward for the websites, as they have long been in need of a facelift to bring them into line with each other. While my design skills are now l33t by any stretch, hopefully they have served me well enough to give the sites a more professional and polished look.
The New Designs
If you haven't seen the sites yet, follow any of the links below. You can then click one of the options from the family navigation bar to see all the others :)
The Static Reports
As mentioned on several occasions now, there is now a static site version of CPAN Testers Reports. However, please bear in mind that some of the pages are huge and will take your browser several minutes to render. The static site is provide as a companion to the dynamic site for those who either wish to not use Javascript, or their method of viewing does not support it. All the same code is used to generate the pages of both sites, so rest assured that any future fixes will be replicated into both sites at the same time.
Once any potential issues are ironed out, I hope to get Jos to switch the DNS for the old testers.cpan.org to point to the new static site. As such, if you currently use the old site and feel there is anything missing from the new site, please let me know as soon as possible.
The CPAN Testers Blog
Another new addition to the CPAN Testers family of websites is the new CPAN Testers Blog. Initially this will just contain the summaries and some of the announcements (as ported from the blog on the old CPAN Testers Statistics site) that have been made over the past couple of years, but in time I hope to encourage others involved with CPAN Testers to contribute news and articles for inclusion.
Feedback
It seems like it's taken forever to these changes done, though in reality it has only been about 2-3 months. It has been an intense working regime, having spent most of my waking, non-employer working hours on the sites, and pretty much full-time during April. I'd personally like to thank Nicole, partly as an art advisor critiquing some of the colour choices, but mostly for putting up with me sitting on the sofa in the evenings for the past few months, while I've been getting all the changes done
As per usual, if there are any problems or (helpful) suggestions you have regarding the new design or a specific site, please let me know.
Now it's time for a rest!
First off, a bunch of nits:
Why are the blog feeds headlines-only?xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" attributes in the Atom feed would suffice for at least one entry anyway…)
I assume http://blog.cpantesters.org/ will henceforth be what http://stats.cpantesters.org/updates.html used to be? In that case, a 301 redirect for the old URI would be nice. Also a 301 from http://stats.cpantesters.org/rss-2.0.xml to http://blog.cpantesters.org/rss/rss-2.0.xml.
I get what you tried to do with the header and I like it, but it needs some tightening up in terms of spacing/alignment to bring out the distinct elements more – my immediate first impression was “garish” before I picked up on what was going on. Nothing springs to mind immediately, but if you’re open to suggestions I’m willing to give it a think.
Anyway! Nits aside, that’s a huge improvement in every way over the previous quirky designs. Two thumbs up!
Re:Much, much better!
barbie on 2009-05-26T08:27:07
Re:Headlines - fixed. Missed a slight change in the body field
:( Re:Atom attributes - this is a bug in XML::Atom. However, I'm not using the latest version on the server, so will investigate whether an upgrade fixes this.
Re:Redirects - I forgot to add all the redirects, so apologies for that. All added now and appear to be working
re:Headings - I'm open to suggestions
:)
As someone mentioned, the colours come across as a teeeeensy bit garish.
But I imagine if pulled back the colour saturation on the different colours about a third it would fix that.
Overall, however, massive massive improvement. Kudos.
It's really good to see a big bunch of Perl sites being updated like this - well done!
