gistfile1.md

Improvements to New YUI Blog Theme

Objective

• Wrong copyright. Should be: "© 2012 Yahoo! Inc." not: "© 2012 YUI Blog"
• Search page is unusable: http://cl.ly/IiYS
  • Looks like the content is not inside a "yui3-u" node: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/?s=open+hours
• Linen texture should only be at the lowest layer of the design (I don't care that iOS uses it for the notification sheets, they did it wrong :)
• Home page's heading alignments are off:
  • Home page: http://cl.ly/Ijqg
  • Post page: http://cl.ly/Iiao

Subjective

Overall I'm not sure using the exact website header is the right thing to do. Here's why:

• You can barely tell you're on the blog, there's just a faint "Blog" in the header.
• The search is not the same search that the website has. This is confusing because it looks like our site at a glance but doesn't function like our site.
• The website's main navigation doesn't make sense for the blog, which is a separate website and has it's own main navigation items.

As the current website header stands today, I don't think it makes sense to whole verbatim on the blog. We should have a way to call attention to the fact that the user is on the blog, and provide an easy way for them to get back to the YUI Library main site.

The linen texture issue is subjective as well. If you use the words "I don't care that" in a sentence, that makes it subjective, by definition. I think the linen looks great in the headers. The other points in that section are good.

The idea that I started with was to incorporate the blog into yuilibrary.com. So I think it's appropriate for it to have the site's header, especially if we move the domain to blog.yuilibrary.com (or even yuilibrary.com/blog). Navigating to other sections of the website makes sense in that case. Besides, if not the site items, we wouldn't have any other items to navigate to - there is nothing else on the blog but the blog (other items like "About" are out of date and should be coming from the site anyway).

The search box says precisely what it does in it. It can't be any clearer, so I disagree on that point.

We can make the word "Blog" more pronounced, too, if we want to avoid potential confusion - but I dont see what's confusing about it.

The new look and feel is great.

I do agree with Eric -- given that the two sites are (currently) separate, and search does something totally different, it makes sense to keep the site navigation distinct, and not try to "pretend" that the blog is a sub-component of yuilibrary.com. At least for now.

But we are not pretending, that's what we are working towards. This is the first step. Are you saying we should roll back on it and remove the navigation / move the search elsewhere until we have transfers to domain? That seems... unnecessary?

Also, there was a whole idea back when we started doing the website that the search would be contextual to the page it's on. So on the forums, it would search the forums; on the docs, it would search the docs, etc. we haven't had the to implement it everywhere, but this is as good a first step as any.

@allenrabinovich So we disagree about where linen textures should be used. That's fine, moving past that:

The idea that I started with was to incorporate the blog into yuilibrary.com. So I think it's appropriate for it to have the site's header, especially if we move the domain to blog.yuilibrary.com (or even yuilibrary.com/blog).

If can only move the blog to http://yuilibrary.com/blog/ if we host it ourself on our own server. The HTTP server that responds to http://yuilibrary.com/ would have to be responsible for serving the WordPress blog as well. I think what's more likely is a move to http://blog.yuilibrary.com/

Navigating to other sections of the website makes sense in that case. Besides, if not the site items, we wouldn't have any other items to navigate to - there is nothing else on the blog but the blog (other items like "About" are out of date and should be coming from the site anyway).

Are there no plans to surface top-level navigation items for the blog? Would we want to have a navigation item for subscribing to content, archives, submitting content, etc.?

If we really want the header to be the exact same, then we shouldn't place "Blog" next to the logo, but instead use a heading in the main content area, like all the other main sections of our website use.

The search box says precisely what it does in it. It can't be any clearer, so I disagree on that point.

But if I'm still on the main YUI Library site, why can I not use that search both to look up some docs about a component? By replacing the search box with something inferior (no auto-complete) that only searches a sub set of YUI content (just blog post), we will confuse users. The blog search box should go in the sidebar, like the API docs search box is. This way we can add back the original search box for the site and make it work cross-domain.

We can make the word "Blog" more pronounced, too, if we want to avoid potential confusion - but I dont see what's confusing about it.

It doesn't fit with the way our headings are for other main sections of the website: http://cl.ly/Iicb replace "YUI User Guides" with "YUI Blog".

The font sizes are slightly different, which causes the header/nav to change size (slightly) if you go between the sites.

yuiblog:

font: 15px/1.6 'PT Sans','DejaVu Sans','Bitstream Vera Sans',Verdana,sans-serif;

yuilibrary:

 font: 14px/1.4 'PT Sans','DejaVu Sans','Bitstream Vera Sans',Verdana,sans-serif;

Also, we should replace the Y! favicon with the YUI one (http://yuilibrary.com/favicon.ico) if possible.

Looks great though!

@derek: I actually made that change on purpose. I find the YUILibrary fonts to be too small, and I have custom CSS to adjust it every time I hit the site. It still works for the site because there aren't huge chunks of text, but the blog actually is a lot more text-heavy and so I preferred the higher text-size/line-height.

@ericf: I'm actually open to reconsidering how the entire header looks. I can propose an alternate design if that helps drive the discussion forward on that, but I'd like to get Jeff's input on it as well.

Also, since we are collecting ideas here, I'd like to make the blog responsive down the road.

• Entries do not print properly -- they are cut off after the first page (FF/Win7).
• Navigation needs to be consistent with yuilibrary.com or better distinguished from it.
• Links to older/newer entries not properly aligned.

@jenny: Created the following tickets to track these issues. I'm meeting with Jeff tomorrow to discuss options re. navigation. @ericf, do you want to join in tomorrow as well?

http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yui3/ticket/2532650
http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yui3/ticket/2532651

• Links to blog "pages" are missing

That's probably part of the navigation discussion. Looks like we'll end up changing the navigation bar at the top - it's just a question of what items we want to surface there.