Quote from: ganeshXL at Feb 07, 2008, 10:56 PM
I’m not a fan of Verdana for big headlines (h1, h2 etc.). Verdana looks best at 10-12px, imho. I’d prefer Arial/Helvetica for titles.
I think overall the various chapters would benefit from a few screenshots thrown in every now and then.
Also, for rather long articles I’d like to see them split over different pages (with a sub-index somewhere). It can be overwhelming when you see a big page with nothing but text. It’s just a psychological thing, but if I knew nothing about MODx and came across your site, I would be slightly worried, i.e. "wow, do I really *have to* read all of this to understand this CMS/CMF?". I hope you get my point.
And finally, for my taste, the main copy line-height is a touch too narrow. Try to increase it a bit. You’re using 16px Georgia, so I reckon 20 or 22px line-height would be ideal.
Thanks. You’re absolutely right about the Arial, it looks much better. I increased the font to 18 and the line-height to 24. I think that looks much friendlier as well, although I’ve only looked at it on a 20" wide-screen WSXGA monitor so I may change my mind after I check it at 800x600
.
Screen shots are definitely on the roadmap but I’m concentrating on getting content up for now.
As for the long pages, I thought quite a bit about this. The other side of the coin is that when you split pages, navigation becomes much more complicated, the menu gets out of hand, and the new user risks getting lost at the site and forgetting what he or she has already read -- going forward and back multiple times while covering a single topic. I would also have the equivalent problem when doing editing and trying to find the particular page I wanted to update.
My model for friendly on-line documentation is the Red-Bean SVN book. It’s not perfect, but I found it really helpful and easy to navigate when I was an SVN newbie (and not at all intimidating). It has pages much longer than mine (e.g.
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.tour.cycle.html#svn.tour.cycle.edit). They could definitely use your advice about line-height, though.
I’ve had really good feedback from absolute newbies on my site as it is and I’m inclined to leave the long pages, especially the ones that cover single procedures like porting your site to MODx or migrating to 0.9.7. My experience is that users coming to the site are *already* intimidated by MODx and making them jump from page to page looking for what they want might make that worse in some cases.
I’m still open to thinking about breaking it down some, but I think I’ll leave it alone for now.
Thanks for the feedback.
Bob
