lack of consistency in website(s) about usrse.github.io

[danielskatz]

Is everyone happy with how things look now? (i.e. can we close this issue?)

[cferenba]

One comment on the beautiful-jekyll issues: I think the problem is not that we are using that theme, but that we've done very little to customize it for our use. I have some ideas on how we can customize it and make it more distinctly ours, but haven't had time to work on them.

[cferenba]

If you can gather some ideas, that would be great - I know I will not get to it in the next week.

[cferenba]

I agree that multiple, seamless sites is probably the best option that answers the issue and does what we need. And it should be technically feasible to do it.

[vsoch]

Thank you for this feedback @danielskatz. The original goal was to serve the various resources under the same domain, and you are right that clicking on the link (from the menu bar) and not having an external link open is confusing for branding. I think it's important to maintain modularity of the sites for ownership and development (e.g. having one massive site with different needs for testing, and even different users that maintain it) gets ugly very fast, but we do need some resolution for the branding. Some thoughts:

• Don't have the other sites link back to "Home" of the main page (I just added this quickly because, well, why not!)
• Have separate branding for the community blog sites (the simpler theme). For example, I developed the /blog first, and then created a custom purple background and transparent logo for a beautiful effect. We can brand the /blog site to match the community pages to have usrse "Community Branding".
• On the main us-rse site, we can have the "community" section open in external URLS, or possibly better, not have it be part of the main navigation if you think this is still confusing @danielskatz.
• No community sites should link back to the main site.

I strongly advocate for not having the Beautiful Jekyll site as the only template because it's overly complicated (for example. try rendering on your local machine and you'll see a style.css mysteriously generate in _site/assets/css despite not having any file!) but also because it's a known template on the internet. When someone opens the site they don't say "Ah, US-RSE, the US-RSE branding!" they say "Ah, Beautiful Jekyll, I know this template!"

In summary, our goals might be to:

• better establish usrse and? usrse community site branding
• clean up confusing links, add links to open in new tabs when it's a "different thing"
• better unify the community blog and community template sites.

@cosden what do you think?

[vsoch]

I'll also note that I think it's great that we are having these discussions, and we have these issues in the first place! It's much better to have meat / content to work with than absence and complete silence. I'll also note that slack is (sometimes) a bit dangerous to have discussions, because given that it's the free version, they are lost forever once your community has a certain number of messages. With GitHub, as long as their service doesn't explode, the issues are Google indexed, reference-able, and searchable (I already said that, I'm getting tired!).

I'm closing up shop for today, but looking forward to discussing these things!

[danielskatz]

I guess one more very specific thing is that in the current site, under the Resources menu, one option keeps you on the site, and another option takes you to another site, and I think the new third option in #50 will take you to a third site. Having items under one menu that have such different behavior is part of my confusion

[cosden]

Looks like I missed a lot of good discussion today! I see value to keeping sites separate from a development standpoint but also in keeping branding and logic flow the same from a web user's perspective. I'd like to think a bit about how to best go about this.
Maybe we can do some thinking here as a group. Who are our target audiences are and how they are likely to interact with the website(s)? What do we want these audiences to find/think? How often do we need to update content? And what should that content be? All these answers would/should stem from our goals as an organization.

In terms of Beautiful Jekyll: I picked it because it seemed relatively flexible and capable (and easy enough for someone like me). I don't think we should feel the need to be married to it at all, now or at any point in the future.

[vsoch]

Good morning and happy Friday! I wanted to share my design thinking for all of the sites that I've made so far, so it doesn't seem random (it has been very intentional.)

RSE Blog

For the blog, I was going for a simpler version of the main site. I didn't want it to look like Beautiful Jekyll, but rather have similar features and a focus on content. This is why I emulated the logo in the top left, and made the articles front and center. But for the actual "design," there mostly isn't one. It was/is still an empty template to be updated with a better design that I wanted to create for the community pages.

Community Template

Now we move onto the community template! For this template you'll notice another feature of Beautiful Jekyll (the box at the top) with the same header as the blog, but a subtly textured background. The logo is also slightly transparent. For this site, my inspiration was the uk RSE site here. Notice how the logo has slight transparency, and the design almost looks smooth. Notice how the dark purple contrasts beautifully against the black. I wanted to capture something similar to that when I worked on the logo repository, or conversion of the power point file to vector graphics (harder than it sounds!).

Next came the background image. I like the image on the front of that page - it shows community, and also does well to contrast with the logo. However, when I started to spend more time on the site, I found that it got in the way of the content. I don't need half of my screen taken up by any photo when I'm trying to read. Regardless of where I click, the first thing I have to do is scroll waaay down, and that's bad user experience. For this reason, I decided to create an icon textured background, make it the exact same color as the logo, and use that to get the color contrast without taking up so much web acreage. I'm very happy with the result, as it is simple and pretty, and looks good on mobile too :)

Summary

So - those were my design decisions. I tend to go for simplicity with a few strong features. What I think could work is to create a community branding, meaning that the blog site gets made to look like the other community sites, and then to have this be one navbar link that opens in a new tab. Opening in a new tab is an indicator of being a different family of site, even if under the same organization. And then of course, it would make sense to remove links to go back to the main site from the header, and move them into the footer area with something like "us-rse home." I'd be happy to make these changes if you agree.

Also just realized that the certificates aren't configured to support www - this should be done when you registry with either Let's Encrypt via tiny-acme, or with (the newer tool) certbot.

[cferenba]

More on beautiful-jekyll: look at the top two example pages on https://deanattali.com/beautiful-jekyll/featured-users/ to get ideas of how we might customize.

[vsoch]

For the first link - the blue is pretty good. A colored (or even better, textured!) header like we have on the community pages would be beautiful - can you imagine that deep plum to match the RSE logo?

For the second link I'm not a fan - the logo is fuzzy, and the spacing on the page is weird. One thing that could be cool (on both these pages) is a really subtle background image. The background images on both pages are too dark (for example, the first looks like someone left some gray bread triangular crumbs on the page) but that could easily be lightened up.

Out of all those links, this is the only one that did enough customization so it's not easily identifyable as a modified beautiful jekyll theme. I would say for their modification the front page is nice (esp. the yellow and blue!) but the header should be reduced to just the same colored navbar for the other pages.

Taking a look at the personal sites - will post ones that have inspiration in a few minutes!

[vsoch]

Another variable we can test (that does wonders for making a site unique, or feel different) is to look at different fonts -> https://fonts.google.com. it's fairly easy to add different Google Font imports to the page, and test. It's usually good to have one for the header divs, and then a good one for the content itself (you commonly see two choices paired for this reason).

[vsoch]

okay I clicked through all the personal sites - they all look the same "just another Beautiful Jekyll site" with different photos and possibly a header image :)

The phrase above is funny because "Just another wordpress site" is a well established tagline in the Wordpress community!

[cferenba]

I agree with the comment about google fonts - I've wanted to investigate some different font choices but it hasn't risen to the top of the to-do list.

[vsoch]

If you want help, I can volunteer to investigate and share some screen shots, maybe this weekend / early next week, or if you get to it first. In the meantime, I've triaged the issue of having three different looking sites to reducing it to 2 by basically changing the navigation for the (currently rather bare) blog site. See USRSE/blog#23 if you'd care to review.

After that, I'd suggest we choose maybe one or two variables to tweak here, and then I can offer to test, and share screen shots, whether that means a subtle background image somewhere, or testing different fonts.

[vsoch]

@cferenba I've put in the first tweak to discuss - having a header background image, akin to the first link that you sent with the blue header. See #52

[danielskatz]

Hi - I feel a little like this issue has moved away from the initial discussion into a design discussion...

I wonder if we can first agree on the website(s) themselves?

First, I fairly strongly dislike the idea of having multiple web sites at all. I understand that this makes development easier, but I really think it's confusing for users.

However, if others disagree, then I strongly want to push to make the sites clearly multiple sites, and to make the navigation between sites obvious.

So can we decide if we do or do not want to have multiple sites first?

And then if we do have multiple sites, talk about navigation between them, as well as styles of how they will made distinct?

I feel like the specific decisions about styles and fonts for each then is a third discussion.

[vsoch]

My vote goes for multiple sites that look seamless. They are served alongside one another on GitHub servers, so it's a technicality about the development location, and the modular development does well to serve multiple different teams that work on the different sites (e.g., community-stanford has permissions for collaborators from Stanford, blog should remain separate because it has an extra collaborator manbat with write permissions from circle, etc.) Logistically, I've done the "Let's try to put all the things in one repository" and what it leads to is burdensome development process of being forced to give too many permissions, and being forced to clone a repository that is huge. It's good to not make that mistake from the getgo.

[danielskatz]

Yes, multiple sites that look seamlessly like one would be another option that I didn't mention - sorry. For some reason, I was thinking we had already decided against that.

If that's an option we can do technically, I would be happy with it.

[vsoch]

What's the typo @dfmenendez, and specifically, the correct date?

[dfmenendez]

I believe there is a typo regarding the date on the PEARC announcement pages at:
https://us-rse.org/blog/2019/usrse/2019-07-15-19-pearc19/
and
https://us-rse.org/2019-07-15-19-PEARC19/

What's the typo @dfmenendez, and specifically, the correct date?

Sorry, maybe this was not the right issue to bring this up. Yes, the date says July 15 instead of July 29.

[cferenba]

@dfmenendez : You are correct, that version has a typo. Thanks for the catch!

We do have the correct date (July 29) at:
https://us-rse.org/events-training/
but apparently something got munged when turning that into a blog post...

[vsoch]

okay, both are fixed. Hey, these things happen! Not a big deal :) Thanks for the catch @dfmenendez !

[vsoch]

@danielskatz 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umj0gu5nEGs&feature=youtu.be#t=1m50s 😆

[cosden]

Clearly my fault! Thanks for the catch.

…

-------- Original message -------- From: Charles Ferenbaugh <[email protected]> Date: 7/16/19 4:43 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "USRSE/usrse.github.io" <[email protected]> Cc: "Ian A. Cosden" <[email protected]>, Mention <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [USRSE/usrse.github.io] lack of consistency in website(s) (#51) @dfmenendez<https://github.com/dfmenendez> : You are correct, that version has a typo. Thanks for the catch! We do have the correct date (July 29) at: https://us-rse.org/events-training/ but apparently something got munged when turning that into a blog post... — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#51?email_source=notifications&email_token=ABMOA2RKB42RHD6AF62SJUDP7YXGNA5CNFSM4HX7ODK2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD2CCVOQ#issuecomment-511978170>, or mute the thread<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABMOA2RI4JBDWDFZU7O46GTP7YXGNANCNFSM4HX7ODKQ>.

[dfmenendez]

Happy to help and thank you for the prompt response :)

[vsoch]

Two thumbs up (and the third implied from @danielskatz who opened the issue and asked about it!) Closing issue!