That's a very bold place to put "Made by Argon", especially at that size.
Is the Web site about who made it or is that auxiliary information? If the latter, that's the wrong spot for that graphic, and I wouldn't have let them get away with it. Even if they were doing it for free.
There's a pretty well-defined footer where that belongs.
That is confusing. Try going back and forth a few times. The text growing legs in the logo and walking a few pixels is rough, especially since it's in the exact same spot and completely obvious when you click. There's some consistency issues that can use improvement. They're clearly still tweaking it, too - I refreshed and the footer completely lost its centering.
Before I began my response to you I scrolled through your responses in this thread. I remember your responses regarding VideoLAN's successes against Applidium, too, so that weighs in to what I'm about to write.
> Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal...
I'm not sure if you intentionally overlook things that the comments you reply to clearly say (you did this in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082505 too), but I acknowledged that the designer might have been doing pro-bono work for you and I still consider the self-promotion inappropriate. The promotion there gives the designer equal footing with the very message of the site itself, which isn't how a Web site works.
The best analogy I can draw here is a production company spokesman standing in the corner of a TV drama, waving and holding a sign that says "we produced this!" for the entire length of the show. Credits in television are reserved for the end, because such a thing as I describe would dilute the message. Your Web site is your public face and your message, and the upper-right side is very prime real estate. The placement, honestly, could be perceived as a sell-out.
I am perfectly aware that pro-bono work or discounted work is traditional for a Web development shop to build a portfolio. I didn't kid myself that the VideoLAN project paid full-price for a site such as the one you have (which looks great, by the way). Even with that in mind, the promotion you are giving your designers, while your prerogative, was very quickly perceived by me and other developers in this thread as being inappropriate. I wouldn't consider the placement and size of their promotion to be "normal" at all.
That defacement of your message is something that I would never do as a designer, myself.
> And this is temporary...
What is? The entire site, or the promotion?
> About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what?
You're right, so what? I didn't draw a conclusion based on the tweaking, I simply expressed some criticism. You'll notice I didn't write "they're still tweaking, man, their site sucks".
Feedback is feedback, and jumping on the defensive when it's offered is suspicious. I went to great lengths not to offer destructive criticism. I expressed great surprise ("ouch!") at the lack of consistency between something as elementary as your logo -- look at the type alignment between / and /vlc/ on your logo. That's a big deal, and I'm surprised it slipped. That's the identity of your brand right there, and I was really surprised that one made it through, that's all.
I was also expressing surprise that the tweaking was being done in production. That is traditionally considered a bad thing, and it makes you look sloppy.
> Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...
With respect, that is absolutely the wrong attitude.
Your Web site is your brochure. It is the first thing people see when they want to know what VLC or the VideoLAN project is. That is your brand. It is your initial impression with anybody who has never heard of you.
I don't care if you consider yourself a professional or not. Everything about VideoLAN, from start to finish, should be treated with extensive polish. You should have a lot of pride in what you do, not excuses ("we are not professional" -- something I am flabbergasted to hear a chairman of a project say).
The logo of my portfolio at the top may have been a bit bold, but its temporary. I had asked for it, to get some additional exposure during the initial few weeks, when people would be curious about the new design.
I tried my best to make the logo blend into the design.
About the logo inconsistency. It's my fault. hanks a lot for pointing that out, I'll fix it.
As far as tweaking in production goes, its usually better to launch and iterate, than to sit and try to make it perfect before launch. The current version works well enough for most people to use it, and I'm sure that not many people really care if the logos or design on all pages aren't consistent (I'm not saying that its not important, just that its not critical enough to hold off on launching).
As far as being professional with the website is concerned. I only did the designs for a couple of pages in Photoshop. The folks at VideoLAN had to code it up themselves and also adapt the designs I gave to fit all other pages. That takes a lot of time and effort. Although I don't speak for VideoLAN, I am sure that they would rather focus on their software than the website.
That being said, I agree that they should work on making their website, and everything else about VideoLAN from start to finish, perfect, but it can only happen if more people volunteer. I'm sure they wouldn't mind if they had more designers and developers offering to polish up their brand.
> As far as tweaking in production goes, its usually better to launch and iterate, than to sit and try to make it perfect before launch.
So tweak on a staging site is my point (and has been all along). If I refresh the page and suddenly the bottom footer is no longer in the center but flush left (with dead white filling the right), that looks sloppy. I'm not saying hold up the launch, I'm saying try your changes on a non-visible site.
To reiterate what I mean here: you should not be running vim on the box hosting www.videolan.org. I watched you do it earlier today.
Commit those changes as a unit, then pull them over to production. Half-baked edits to production should never happen on a public-facing site, especially with $20/mo VPS providers that can spin you up a server in minutes.
> To reiterate what I mean here: you should not be running vim on the box hosting www.videolan.org. I watched you do it earlier today.
Very unlikely. The Website is open source, and the www.v.o pulls the svn every few minutes and recompiles it.
You'll see the website change quite a lot in the next days, because of that...
But the main thing is that you don't like the way we see the website, ever-evolving and not 100%-tested before. I agree, but we don't have the teams to do that.
While I don't disagree, I had to reopen the link to figure out what you were talking about. The even bigger banner and traffic cone logo drew my attention away from the top of the page such that I never noticed the self-promotion up there.
Of course if I actually tried to navigate on the site, it would be a different story, I'm sure.
VLC, while it often just works, is one of the slowest players I know. I often have a lot of jittering, esp. when doing some CPU/IO intensive work in the background but also without. Sometimes when I play from a Samba share, it may also because of slow connection, whereby the connection should be fast enough to play it in real-time without a problem. I already played a lot around with settings like skipping frames, cache size, etc. but I never really got it removed completely. And the UI, esp. controls like play/pause, also feel a bit laggy. E.g., when I hit pause, it still plays for about half a second.
MPlayer is among the fastest players I know. One good sign of that is that I can normally play Xvid/H264 videos with it on my 350MHz PII with an onboard graphics card (Riva128) in Xorg without any problem. And on my normal PC, it never has any performance problems, no matter what I do in the background. And it also responds really fast. When I hit pause, it instantly pauses.
Only problem with MPlayer: It often does not integrate that well, at least on MacOSX (maybe most of this is Mac related). And there are no real official binaries and the ones which exists are outdated. Also, all of the available GUIs often have further problems and make the performance a lot worse (which I don't really understand).
Anyway, why I am writing this: Often enough, I have thought about that the VLC GUI and OS integration (also including automatic updates, etc.), with MPlayer as the engine, would be the best thing.
Likely a Mac related problem. I have no trouble with VLC on my Windows machine nor on my work iMac. However, the home iMac has issues.
In my administrator account on the machine the video is fine, but in my wife's non-privileged account the video can stutter. And all video stutters--flash, VLC, QuickTime. And it comes and goes with various OS updates.
What I also experienced under Linux: It eats more power. When playing videos just on battery on my notebook, I could play much longer with mplayer and the CPU cooler stayed very slow/silent. This difference was very notable on my PowerPC notebook but also later on x86 notebooks.
Weird, I find VLC to perform much better on my 2009 MBP than MPlayer. I tried switching and gave up after 15 minutes of constant stuttering in MPlayer OSX Extended.
And I really wonder why the difference is so immense. Maybe the MPlayer OSX Extended GUI totally sucks. But all the other GUIs I have tried seem also to suck performance-wise or with other problems.
To be honest, a lot of the front-end issues are going to be tough to fix for a number of reasons. There are 50+ instances of inline CSS styling on just the home page, and the CSS is minified so it's hard to pass on changes that can be made in Firebug.
As well, much of the copy on the page is using line breaks rather than new paragraphs, which is why you see funny spacing like in these examples.
While I do think the bulk of the design is quite nice, the HTML/CSS end of it could use some refactoring.
First thing to do is to get rid of the justified text. Stick with ragged-right (flush left). Then you can make a better judgement of correct line spacing after the word spacing is no longer so inconsistent.
it also looks like you're line breaking after every sentence... I would make it either one big paragraph, bullet points, or put in real paragraph breaks if they are meant to be separate paragraphs.
Is the Web site about who made it or is that auxiliary information? If the latter, that's the wrong spot for that graphic, and I wouldn't have let them get away with it. Even if they were doing it for free.
There's a pretty well-defined footer where that belongs.
Edit: Ouch. Compare:
> http://www.videolan.org/
> http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
That is confusing. Try going back and forth a few times. The text growing legs in the logo and walking a few pixels is rough, especially since it's in the exact same spot and completely obvious when you click. There's some consistency issues that can use improvement. They're clearly still tweaking it, too - I refreshed and the footer completely lost its centering.