While YUI is probably one of the best JS frameworks around the sloppy design of their webpage beats me. the yuilibrary.com looks so 90ish in its design.
We're admittedly programmers and not designers. Our main focus for the redesign was to improve usability, remove clutter, and decrease the overhead involved in finding relevant content. The new user guides and API docs in particular got the most attention in this regard, and I'm pretty happy with the result. It's not super sexy, but it sure is usable.
* Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px. * Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns. * If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github
- We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet).
- Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users, you get Arial).
- The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely. This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs.
Keep the feedback coming!
I feel like you have over 20 different shades of blue if you count all the backgrounds & borders on elements -- which is annoying since blue is usually the color for links. Facebook is known for their blue color, yet they only use 4 shades of blue total.
When I'm learning anything visual (GUI, plotting libraries) I really like a gallery of live examples.
YUI's site seems to assume that you already know what you are looking for.
The new site puts 4 examples (todo, calendar, charts, and search) on the home page, which is 4 more than I found the last time I looked. For contrast, jQuery UI has dozens of examples (under http://jqueryui.com/demos).
You have the pages - http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/examples/, but it's not really promoted. I bet you don't get many clicks to that page (due to the design of your site pushing people to other sections), but I bet the people who go there find it useful. Everyone else lands here: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/. Unless they think to go back, everywhere they click will look like a man page, complete with big "caveat" boxes. Functional, if you are debugging YUI, but otherwise it's just ugly.
IMO, you should promote the live examples more, rather than the API docs. If I want to do some complex stuff, I'll look for a section labeled "API". If I'm just trying to assess whether a toolkit is useful, if I don't stumble onto live examples I'll wonder why you aren't even using the tookit on its own homepage.
You could also go one better, and put some screenshots (or inlined examples) on the example index docs/examples/.
People don't complain about "design" because they think it's ugly. They complain because they can't find what they are looking for (even if they don't know what they want).