sopython-site design

[Ffisegydd]

The Trello card had a fair bit of discussion which I will summarise below:

• It would be nice to give sopython-site a facelift to make it more inviting
• At the moment we use Bootstrap 3
• This was chosen because it is relatively easy to use and can get a decent design going quite quickly
• The UX portion of this is especially important as we begin to add new features to the website, it would be good to have a nice, consistent layout etc.
• Possible ideas suggested by @DarkCrowz are:
  • a "first time here" guide. Something of this ilk: http://tympanus.net/Development/WebsiteTour/
  • a feed of python based news from reliable sites. For example, python releases and stuff like that (https://www.python.org/news)
  • A python module of the week. Some specific python based library, what it does, why you want to use it, and user comments about it.
  • perhaps some language statistics, or using nidaba, create a chart of "daily questions". Static example: http://jsfiddle.net/6kbm3vvg/
  • Community activity. Something like finding all the users of SOPython who are active in the chatroom currently.
  • popular python questions on stack overflow, or questions with bounty.
  • guides, tutorials, places to learn, stuff to foster learning at all levels

[MattDMo]

Do we still want to use Bootstrap 3, or look into some other framework? I vote for staying with Bootstrap, but creating our own theme - it's just too Ubuntu-ish now :grimacing:

[joncle]

Thanks for re-raising this - I believe you potentially volunteered for suggestions to the theme @MattDMo - it's been sitting around for a while with the idea you and @petervaro could provide input to it.

At the moment functionality is the main drive. The design/theme can run as a parallel project if needs be. I admit it would be nice if it didn't look so "similar" to something else/just "off the shelf themed", but those are changes that don't have a high priority - although I'd appreciate @davidism's and @Ffisegydd's input on that.

If someone wants to have a go at a new theme, there's nothing stopping them...

[davidism]

Please, someone, make us a better theme. Use Bootstrap 3 SCSS.

[Ffisegydd]

Adding the help-wanted label is a little bit silly, since we want help for everything but I thought it worth adding as this is something we really want help with :p