And this is temporary...
About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what? Small steps for iterations...
Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...
> Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal...
I'm not sure if you intentionally overlook things that the comments you reply to clearly say (you did this in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082505 too), but I acknowledged that the designer might have been doing pro-bono work for you and I still consider the self-promotion inappropriate. The promotion there gives the designer equal footing with the very message of the site itself, which isn't how a Web site works.
The best analogy I can draw here is a production company spokesman standing in the corner of a TV drama, waving and holding a sign that says "we produced this!" for the entire length of the show. Credits in television are reserved for the end, because such a thing as I describe would dilute the message. Your Web site is your public face and your message, and the upper-right side is very prime real estate. The placement, honestly, could be perceived as a sell-out.
I am perfectly aware that pro-bono work or discounted work is traditional for a Web development shop to build a portfolio. I didn't kid myself that the VideoLAN project paid full-price for a site such as the one you have (which looks great, by the way). Even with that in mind, the promotion you are giving your designers, while your prerogative, was very quickly perceived by me and other developers in this thread as being inappropriate. I wouldn't consider the placement and size of their promotion to be "normal" at all.
That defacement of your message is something that I would never do as a designer, myself.
> And this is temporary...
What is? The entire site, or the promotion?
> About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what?
You're right, so what? I didn't draw a conclusion based on the tweaking, I simply expressed some criticism. You'll notice I didn't write "they're still tweaking, man, their site sucks".
Feedback is feedback, and jumping on the defensive when it's offered is suspicious. I went to great lengths not to offer destructive criticism. I expressed great surprise ("ouch!") at the lack of consistency between something as elementary as your logo -- look at the type alignment between / and /vlc/ on your logo. That's a big deal, and I'm surprised it slipped. That's the identity of your brand right there, and I was really surprised that one made it through, that's all.
I was also expressing surprise that the tweaking was being done in production. That is traditionally considered a bad thing, and it makes you look sloppy.
> Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...
With respect, that is absolutely the wrong attitude.
Your Web site is your brochure. It is the first thing people see when they want to know what VLC or the VideoLAN project is. That is your brand. It is your initial impression with anybody who has never heard of you.
I don't care if you consider yourself a professional or not. Everything about VideoLAN, from start to finish, should be treated with extensive polish. You should have a lot of pride in what you do, not excuses ("we are not professional" -- something I am flabbergasted to hear a chairman of a project say).
The logo of my portfolio at the top may have been a bit bold, but its temporary. I had asked for it, to get some additional exposure during the initial few weeks, when people would be curious about the new design.
I tried my best to make the logo blend into the design.
About the logo inconsistency. It's my fault. hanks a lot for pointing that out, I'll fix it.
As far as tweaking in production goes, its usually better to launch and iterate, than to sit and try to make it perfect before launch. The current version works well enough for most people to use it, and I'm sure that not many people really care if the logos or design on all pages aren't consistent (I'm not saying that its not important, just that its not critical enough to hold off on launching).
As far as being professional with the website is concerned. I only did the designs for a couple of pages in Photoshop. The folks at VideoLAN had to code it up themselves and also adapt the designs I gave to fit all other pages. That takes a lot of time and effort. Although I don't speak for VideoLAN, I am sure that they would rather focus on their software than the website.
That being said, I agree that they should work on making their website, and everything else about VideoLAN from start to finish, perfect, but it can only happen if more people volunteer. I'm sure they wouldn't mind if they had more designers and developers offering to polish up their brand.
So tweak on a staging site is my point (and has been all along). If I refresh the page and suddenly the bottom footer is no longer in the center but flush left (with dead white filling the right), that looks sloppy. I'm not saying hold up the launch, I'm saying try your changes on a non-visible site.
To reiterate what I mean here: you should not be running vim on the box hosting www.videolan.org. I watched you do it earlier today.
Commit those changes as a unit, then pull them over to production. Half-baked edits to production should never happen on a public-facing site, especially with $20/mo VPS providers that can spin you up a server in minutes.
Very unlikely. The Website is open source, and the www.v.o pulls the svn every few minutes and recompiles it.
You'll see the website change quite a lot in the next days, because of that...
But the main thing is that you don't like the way we see the website, ever-evolving and not 100%-tested before. I agree, but we don't have the teams to do that.
>What is? The entire site, or the promotion?
The promotion.
> Everything about VideoLAN, from start to finish, should be treated with extensive polish.
Do you have any idea how much work this is? The VideoLAN team is a 5 guys work... For software used by around 100 million users...
So, no, VideoLAN doesn't have extensive polish, at all... People have to understand that.
Therefore, the website is one of our last concerns, because it doesn't help us a lot for our day-to-day work.
The new website has many issues, but as it is an order of magnitude better than the old one, it is in production.