Re: New site design

[James Frazer <james.frazer@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure if anyone is going to see this reply (considering how late 
it is), but I'd like to mention a few things to address the 
comments/concerns of others here.

Firstly it should be mentioned that I had expected to have more time to 
work on this (originally), but I started work two weeks early and ran 
out of time -- presently I spend all my time working... so there's not 
much I can do in the way of changes, but I will give my opinion and 
reasoning for how I arrived at what I created.

I had a few simple goals:

1.  Fast loading - the old page was really slow on dialup, and yes, 
there are still some of us who are stuck on dialup from time to time.

2.  Simplify the presentation & navigation so that the majority of 
visitors could find what they were most likely to want (eg: download 
link)... the new site isn't perfect, but the old site was really 
cluttered, and there were a lot of links that went to small amounts of 
content.

3.  Change the colours/graphics, as I felt they made the site look like 
a nature conservation group.

4.  Small evolutionary changes, nothing too radical.

5.  Move some content (and mostly dynamic content) to the wiki.  This is 
a good idea in principle, but I must say that moinmoin is not very 
userfriendly and is a pain in the ass to learn/use.  Kind of ironic that 
pure html in vi and an ftp client would be 100 times easier and more 
intuitive for content changes.

I'll now reply to select comments individually.