On 29 March 2010 16:16, Sean Leather
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 16:24, Simon Marlow wrote:
IMHO, these aren't compelling reasons. Note that already on your page there is an inconsistency between the tabs at the top and the headings at the bottom: I don't know where to look to find the content I want. Put the navigation in one place.
A sitemap: sitemaps are for robots. If you're worried about cluttering up the page, use drop-down menus.
SEO: we shouldn't compromise the usability or appearance of the site for SEO. If we do it right, SEO takes care of itself - and it's not like we care that much about SEO here, we're not competing with other sites to sell you Haskell.
I like something like this footer (though I don't think this is a great one: page-specific wiki actions doesn't belong, and I don't get the "Reports" column). It clearly doesn't serve as main navigation. For me, it's the "where do I go next" collection of links for when I've read the page. I think it can improve usability, not hurt it.
As for SEO, I don't think the concern should be "do we show up high in the ranks?" but rather "does a query in a search engine take you to the most appropriate page?" I've long been frustrated by Google not being able to find good answers to my Haskell-related questions. If there's anything we can do to improve this issue by changing the page layout and structure of haskell.org, then I'm all for it. This in itself is a matter of usability.
Well, I'm not a usability expert nor do I have any research handy about how to do this properly. If someone is or has, that would be great! I was going to ask the guy at work who is a usability expert and up on W3C recommendations, but he wasn't in! Meanwhile for the sake of productivity I'll just take it out and get cracking. If someone thinks something's confusing we can just take it out, no problem.