512715 - Banner and "we believe" on front page are too big

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Zack Weinberg (:zwol)]

Attachment: screen shot

The attached screenshot is what I see when I load the www.mozilla.org front page on my laptop, which has an 1280x800 display -- pretty typical nowadays.  I think the black banner area and the "We believe" are clearly much too big.  The "our projects" box should not be off the bottom of the first visible screen.

Part of the problem is that I don't have the Georgia font on this computer --  people who do tell me that "We believe" is on one line for them -- but even then it's still too big, and why are we assuming people have particular fonts?

I would add that having a big black box over the Lizard's face looks wrong.

Comment 1

[David Boswell]

There are two different things I think we should do here:

* We can tighten things up a few pixels in the header -- make margins smaller, remove horizontal line below Our Causes, etc.  Even a 10 pixel reduction would go a long way.

* For smaller screens and smaller windows we plan to use media queries to optimize things and this could involve switching to a smaller header that had the nav elements oriented horizontally possibly or other changes to improve the experience.  See bug 492609 for more about the media query optimization.

Beyond those things, IMO the header is a feature and not a bug.  We want a design that is bold and we should be able to strike a balance between the look of the site and it's usability.

Comment 2

[David Boswell]

We can address this when we use media queries to optimize the site for small
and large screens.  See bug 492609 for details.

Comment 3

[David Boswell]

Note that we're refreshing the site design and reducing the size of the banner and intro message.  You can see some mockups at the link below.

http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/help-us-test-the-new-mozilla-org-home-page/

These aren't implemented yet but will be soon.  Feel free to reopen if there still seems to be too much space devoted to these elements when these changes go live.