Website landing page revamp

The donation buttons look good now! Just one more thing: it seems like there is some issue with the donate field:
image

Although the doante link points to About | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository (see metadata/org.fdroid.fdroid.yml · master · F-Droid / Data · GitLab) it is regognized as PayPal link. For some reason, an incorrect value is assigned to the is_paypal variable. However, the code looks good:

{% assign is_paypal = page.donate contains "paypal.com" or page.donate contains "paypal.me" %}

The generate HTML is

<li class="package-link donate-option misc">
    <a href="https://f-droid.org/about" title="Donate via PayPal">
        <img src="/fdroid-website/assets/paypal-2.png" alt="Donate via PayPal">
    </a>
</li>

Offtopic: why is there no extra field for PayPal in the metadata?

Thanks, @Tobias_Groza, I briefly read that code when I was doing this section, yes the paypal links are “dynamically” produced.

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A few updates on the fiddly menu and nav stuff. Have a clean “underline search” template working, which will be used at the top of the landing page and in the new footer also. @hans you may be happy to see the shine is gone :slight_smile:

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Did a (the) tutorial pages and was able to simplify CSS after the past improvements and simplifications. Step 3 on this page was missing a closing HTML tag + did some semantic HTML improvements (simplifications) on the main tutorial page.

(Still one commit big commit but I hope to finish the menu and social buttons tomorrow and thus will be ready to break up the commit into at least two.

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I tried to stay out of this, because I can’t design.

But this seems to be approaching something final-ish? I’ll have a few personal comments, feel free to disregard them.

  • I really, don’t like the color scheme, it’s too dark, too little contrast, and somehow feels restricting to me. (For context: I never use a dark theme in anything, if I can help it at all.) But look at gitlab, github, stackoverflow, discourse, wikipedia, to name a few websites I use a lot, all of them have a mainly white background, could we maybe stick to that as well?

  • image
    This, to me, looks like everything is selected except page 1. Additionally I wanted clean up the speck of dirt under the 1 :see_no_evil:.

  • image
    I don’t think the bleeding colours work particularly well here, I like the mouse-over colours though. But maybe we should consider doing something like this instead: overhaul donate options (!499) · Merge requests · F-Droid / Website · GitLab

(Sorry if that came across as too harsh, there are probably a lot of great improvements in here. I’m happy that someone is working on this.)

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I’ve had positive feedback on the not 100% white background. I personally find it looks cleaner especially when there are icons and screenshots on the screen that do have white in them, but even when there’s no white elements I find it’s more calming. Lower contrast and less overstated is where I’ve noticed designs on the web going, but maybe these are the sites I stop to have a good look at.

What I might do is use the white version of the FDroid logo (as opposed to the complimentary grey version) on these internal pages. The landing(front) page I’m about to put together will have plenty of lively contrast an will use the complimentary grey and yellow versions of the FDroid icon.

I was experimenting with an idea someone suggested to ditch buttons 4,5,6,7,8,9 but in hindsight I think this was a mistake. I think it may be making the buttons seem less intuitive and more confusing. I’d be okay with returning to having more buttons, and this might solve the problem. (EDIT: Maybe the current square could be underlined and of the text color (ie. very dark blue)??)

I needed something extra to help the buttons appear visually interesting when they are all matching and small in the siderbar. The coloured glow just wasn’t enough to draw the needed attention and so I added a gold tint. I just removed the coloured glow and the buttons just aren’t visually stimulating at that small size, on the landing page I’m not going to use the gold tint on the buttons nor the coloured glow because they will be bigger on the screen in their own dedicated pane (ignoring the paypal and flattr buttons). So what you are seeing will only be on the internal pages, which is still important but maybe a bit less so.

I’m not fond of white backgrounds either, the current design looks ok to me. :slight_smile:

Good to hear you like the light gray too, Licaon.

Basically done the menu now. Only thing left is the footer but I’ll do the footer during the landing page update.

  • Will clean code hopefully tomorrow and split up the commit so it’s easier to merge.
  • Social icons are done.
  • Menu scrolls properly again (on small screens)
  • Donate links have little heart that matches the 10 year celebration icon (@Bubu).
  • White version of FDroid icon,
  • Paginator buttons not so hidden anymore (@Bubu), made the current page button dark blue and removed the bullet below it.

NOTE: It may take 20 minutes for the page to stage here. (Commit)

Looks great! I have tested the page on my phone and noticed 3 little issues (device: OnePlus 3T)

  1. I am able to scroll the website horizontally to reveal a grey border. When scrolling the screenshots horizontally, this interferes with each other. This is not possible on the “old” website.
  2. The menu button overlaps the search bar. Additionally, the menu is located a bit too far to the right. When viewing the website horizontally centered, the text of the second menu column is cut off. Might be related to 1.
  3. The contrast between the “squircle” icon on top and the page background is quite low. In my opinion, this looks a bit strange. Maybe you could remove the gradient from the icon (to make it more light) or make it darker.
    image

Edit: I noticed another thing. The language selector icon states (white/dark) have a different resolution. The white version looks a bit blurry when compared to the dark version.

Thanks @ByteHamster for your assessment.

  1. Fixed now (I think). Thanks.
  2. This was intentional on small displays in case there wasn’t space for the full menu. I removed it though because you reported it.
  3. Yes I agreed and so this was fixed yesterday but Gitlab rejected that build so you were seeing a slightly older version.
  4. Re your edit, I couldn’t replicate that (the on-dark version of the language-select seems sharp).

Feel free to check it now if you like and tell me if its better. Also the items addressed in my previous message are now also testable, like the Donate button (@Bubu).

If there are no other major issues will produce more modular commits later today (massive commit here).

Thanks. The horizontal scrolling and the menu are fixed.

  1. I checked the icons and they in fact have a different resolution: https://webdev4.gitlab.io/fdroid-website/assets/icon_language-select_white.png vs https://webdev4.gitlab.io/fdroid-website/assets/icon_language-select_dark.png. Maybe this is somehow related to my screen resolution or I am overly sensitive :smiley:

  2. I am wondering how many users of the website have installed a font that does not support all emoji. On my PC, the T-Shirt section looks like the screenshot below. This is not a new problem, though. Some nitpicking: Now that the page background is darker, the hellotux logo has a white background.
    image

  3. To be honest, I do not like the red on blue donation icon. Red on blue always looks a bit strange, I think. I suggest using white instead.
    image

Np. Thank you!
4. Well spotted, and now fixed. Thanks.
5. Good Q! Windows might fail to do emojis on occasion. Even in Tor on other OSes the emojis show. I fixed the white Hellotux logo so it’s transparent, yes thanks. I’ll leave the emojis in place for now but the landing page design that I’m doing will involve removing them yes (see below, ignoring the Paypal, Flattr buttons and the missing ‘s’ at the end of “T-shirt”).

  1. Agree, that’s why I chose a pink variant rather than pure red. I think it draws just the right amount of attention. Not too much or too little. A white heart has no impact. I experimented with a green heart to match F-Droid but it was odd. (new commit)
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Hello,

I’ve had a chance to rebase the previous work I done and do the Donate sidebar for Open Collective, the Donate page (some improved code reuse, language reuse, semantic HTML improvments, added an image of the green Tee from Hellotux, alt text, etc).

Although I’ve pushed the commit to my staging site I doubt that my staging will build due to the newly added spell-checker (@hans?)

If I’ve made any mistakes, please tell me.

Cheers

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@webDev By doing “Donate” in a tab of its own, it causes issues sooner for horizontal screen estate, considering also that some translations are longer than English.
The “Donate” is on every page anyhow(?).
I would add it to “contribute”, make that label green, and add the heart there.

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Hi Kingu, good to hear from you again!

I’ve actually done a few things to compensate for this:

-- <text-transform: capitalize;> (no more uppercase)

-- BROWSE
+ Apps

-- ISSUES (this tab has been moved to the dropdown menu)

In terms of horizontal real-estate, the menu items wrap to a new line on smaller displays. Its good behaviour for internal pages (the landing page will be different as approved by Contributors in the Communication Strategy).

Contributors showed interest in having a donate tab.

I did experiment with colours but I found them to be too much. A little pinky-red heart was enough for me.

BTW good news, a re-based version of the Merge Request, without other dependency issues (@uniqx) is built and is able to be tested here. It’s missing the removal of uppercase, that will come later (I’ll bring it forward if people want.)

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Awesome work, @webDev! :ok_hand:

I have no problem with dark themes, but on the dark menu, I’m with @bubu. That menu looks like it comes from a different site. I think the menus need to use the existing color schemes. It has been the color scheme for 10 years, so changing it will make users think its not the same site: F-Droid · Android FOSS News, Reviews and More

I’m open to updating the color scheme, that needs to happen as its own effort and all at once like including the client. But just tacking on UI elements with a different color scheme looks piecemeal.

About restoring lower case to the menu items, I do like that. I think that could happen with a merge request that goes with the color styling.

Bubu was taking about the light-grey background. The menu I agree didn’t look right when it was charcoal so I made it dark-blue to compliment the F-Droid look-and-feel.

I like to think of the light-grey background as a sign of maturity, a sign that people might want to spend more time browsing the site and a slightly lower contrast and intensity of white is a sensible step forward in accomodating that. Also there are many app icons and screenshots with white so, we are making those apps pop from the background.

Even Stack Overflow have produced a low contrast dark theme.

If we make a change that improves usability and respects the existing look-and-feel, I think that’s the way forward and a good thing.

Thirdly the FDroid apps light theme does use a light grey background, I see it behind the panes. That’s actually a look that I’m using on the Landing page update.

Yeah, that’s going to be important. I’ll include it soon.

Here’s the Merge Request for the Dropdown Menu.

Staged here.

It adds functionality for all users but is especially useful for small device users. They’ll get faster access to a bunch of pages and search functionality. The design was accepted by the community during the design stage (above), but happy to take further suggestions and improvements as always.

Howdy folks,

Here’s some changes to improves margins and positioning on the site.

These are uploaded as GIFs but I don’t know if they’ll remain as GIFs, if not I’ll upload separate images.

Landing page:

06web-marginsAndPositioning01

Apps (english):

06web-marginsAndPositioning02

Apps (left-to-right):

06web-marginsAndPositioning03

App page:

06web-marginsAndPositioning04

These changes are staged here so please test them out.

The Merge Request is here.

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