New Qubes Website! New Whonix Website?

That’s both better. 1) is better than 2). But if doable, it should not take the whole background at all. More like the https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/ page. If I had to describe their website, paint it, it would be like the following…

logo | page navigation
non-image (just background) | image | (white) border | image | non-image (just background)
more stuff

(Actually https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/ their visible to the eye two images is technically just a single jpg.)

Their background “image” is just a simple gray/white. On top of that background are these images.


As for the middle section (without scrolling, first impression)… Here is a very rough sketch…

------------------------------
|     navigation             |
|                            | 
|  be anonymous with Whonix  |
|                            | 
|     [1]     |     [2]      |
| surveilance!|    fine :)   |
|                            | 
|         download           | 
------------------------------

These two images are the best ones I found in 15 minutes or so with unclear licensing just for demonstrational purposes:

[1] http://blog.ericgoldman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/shutterstock_178782764.jpg

[2] Entspannter Geschäftsmann stockbild. Bild von konzepte - 2462101

There would be these emotional images. 1) you have a problem 2) with Whonix you are fine. These images would have a subtext.

surveillance! - Some catchy phrase like “you are naked!” “you are being monitored!”

fine - Whonix protects you.

Both, the two images and the two sub text are up for brain storming. Just the very basic concept.

That’s my idea. Can you imagine what I mean? And separate from that, does it make sense? If it doesn’t or if it’s not doable, then never mind.

Good day,

That would obviously be possible, however, a part of the aesthetic I was going for with this was having every part of the page strech out across the entire window. Could obviously add such white bars on the site though.

If you just want this white bars to be part of the header picture, that would be possible as well though.

That’s the case with the last version as well, as to avoid using any unnecessary scripts.

That obviously would be the least problem, the colors and numbers where just for demonstration purposes and should be viewed as placeholders until a desicion over the final pictures has been made.

For such a thing, asside from having proper licensing (CC0 would be best) we also need to keep in mind scaling (vertical is better since the two would share horizontal space) and resolution, as these two are things which can hardly be changed after the fact without loosing a lot of quality/streching everything until it looks like a mess. Also, such a picture would have to be matched with a fitting font and font color.

Keeping all that in mind, how about one of these (the blocky nature of the background is both a product of messy work and incompatible resolutions):

1.)

2.)

Though personally, I feel like maybe looking in a completley different direction might not be such a bad idea. Maybe subtlety would be the best aproach here, as this all black background is, at least for me, quite acceptable as well:

Or, maybe something like this, which would make it possible to keep a coherent style as well:

Whatever you choose is fine by me.

Have a nice day,

Ego

No special requirement. Just used these to communicate a possible concept.

Yes.

https://forums.whonix.org/uploads/default/original/1X/16ab6c9ff8570a4f62fb95e645e031fdf5263590.JPG ) could be problematic with respect to trademarks. [Once bitten, twice shy. - The Tor Project Trademark versus TorBOX / Whonix]

Yes, I most like the super minimal thing:

https://forums.whonix.org/uploads/default/original/1X/17e1dcac6b62162a900c52cc40049e0f8030abcc.JPG

I’d say lets go with something minimal for now. Simple to implement. Simple to agree. We can keep the super minimal for a year or so. We will be reaching a specific group of people that is receptive to that kind of style.


One day it would still be great to move to the emotional images approach. [Will be fun for me to learn more about brains…] In theory, it would reach another group of people the minimal one would not reach. Which concept would be more efficient (measured in terms of smaller bounce rate, more downloads…) is probably difficult to say. We all have great intuitions but to find out what really works best for crowds is best figured out by running scientific experiments.

On emotions, I have read
How Emotion Can Impact Your Website Conversions | Design Shack

It sounds plausible. But plausibility does not mean actual reality. Why should I believe it.

Something as trivial as “I was had a coffee at starbucks.” sounds plausible. No one would question it. (Specifically not such a trivial example.) Doesn’t mean it is what actually happened in reality.

So we need numbers, data, facts. :wink:

http://conversionxl.com/why-simple-websites-are-scientifically-better/ in summary says, it’s good to look like another website in the same category due to cognitive fluency effect humans judge websites more beautyful if it matches their expectations. Sounds “plausible” to me, due to the “laziness” of the brain (still in energy savings optimization mode nowadays).

Let’s please go for a white background for the first page… Because most successful software projects do use a bright design there.

I thought why not look at the most popular, successful projects in our category. I don’t mean so much anonymity software, because there are not so many of them, but software project pages generally. (Windows and Adobe are exceptions since hard selling and pre-installation [ads] etc. are involved.) I have had a hard time finding a list of most popular software generally. But chrome, vlc, avira antivir, skype should be good examples of bright, minimal websites of very popular, successful software projects. [Oh well, you could make a case against the chrome website by saying it was pushed bygoogle and you would be right.]

The chrome website is my favorite minimal one. They have nice big “somewhat centric” top navigation buttons and a lot white space.

Skype my second best minimal/emotional one.

Good day,

Is understandable, especially for me, the person who has time and time again preached that the world would set itself on fire if we just thought about using someone else’s intellectual property. However, whether this specific style can be/is trademarked is up for debate.

Was only an example anyway though for {insert nerdy reference here}.

Great, adding something after the fact would obviously be no problem.

Understandable.

About that… Well, let’s just say that because scientist are paid for interesting results and especially behaviour experiments are rather hard to replicate (and replication isn’t really that valued in the community as a whole), numbers often lie even more efficiently, thanks to “p-hacking”, etc. It’s possible to find statistical significance between the reproductive behaviour of birds and the likelihood for a change in government, more details here: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2014/p-hacking.shtml

Other than that though, obviously trusting on “hard facts” is definitely the more efficient approach.

Great read, everything checks out. Based on a simple study with an adequate size of participants done by people who know what they do. This is definitely something to base a concept around.

I’d beg to differ there, familiarity doesn’t lead to an inherently lower power consumption on part of our brain, as it indicates that prior knowledge is being accessed in that moment. Seeing how this information thus had to be stored and keeping in mind the fact our brain works closest to RAM when comparing it to a computer, in the sense that a constant flow of electricity is necessary, otherwise the information is permanently lost, the contrary actually is the case, i.e. that what may seem like “laziness” actually needs a lot more energy. Learning/Experiencing something new is, very easily put, at least for our brain, less energy consuming than accessing old information which, for the time it was stored had to constantly be “fed” with energy. In that regard our brain is actually a incredibly efficient organ considering how little raw energy actually is necessary for it to work properly.

Sure, done.

Are definitely good examples and without wanting to brag, at least from my point of view this has already been a direction I went. The current version is somewhat of a combination between the elements used on the quoted sites, like having short bursts of text with images, a center download button, etc.

For me at least, that doesn’t make the website they created any less good of an example. Then again, I’m using that browser right now so…

Could go a bit more in that direction obviously. The reason why their navbar is more in the center though is simply that their whole page is more in the center, with images not on the site of text like at Skype, VLC and my test-page but rather under the text which makes the site more vertical while not stretching far to the sites. Is also possible, purely personal preference here, as quite a lot of pages, like the Skype example make more use of horizontal space.

Anyway, I’ll first have to clean the page so it isn’t overloaded with useless code and finally fix every CSS related scaling issue I created accidentally.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1 Like

Please make the KVM downloads more clear on the frontpage. The current layout is confusing to people who want to try it out. Hiding it to avoid embarrassing the Whonix family is starting to bring up questions like this:

HulaHoop:

Please make the KVM downloads more clear on the frontpage. The current layout is confusing to people who want to try it out. Hiding it to avoid embarrassing the Whonix family is starting to bring up questions like this:

KVM-Qemu & Whonix

A case where a user failed to put “whonix kvm” into a search engine
before asking a question.

2 Likes

Good point but I think you need to define who our user is and their skill level and take it into account when planning the redesign.

1 Like

ura design does graphics and artwork for opensource projects on a pay what you want basis (meaning you can set it to zero). Seems they’ve done work for many large projects including Red Hat and Mozilla. They are worth a try:

https://twitter.com/uraworks

3 Likes

I think this is defined above. In summary… Super simple. As simple as possible. For layman. And once you imagine that, go simpler.[quote=“HulaHoop, post:46, topic:1736, full:true”]
ura design does graphics and artwork for opensource projects on a pay what you want basis (meaning you can set it to zero). Seems they’ve done work for many large projects including Red Hat and Mozilla. They are worth a try:

https://twitter.com/uraworkshttp://ura.al/
[/quote]
Awesome! Didn’t know such a service exists. Should we discuss contacting them in this thread or make a separate one?

OK shouldn’t we cater for those whose skills are so simple that they don’t use a search engine to find the appropiate links?

:slight_smile:

A separate one is better.

1 Like

definitely , If they dont charge too much I would be willing to contribute some “Fiat Paper” (Money) to that cause :wink:

1 Like

Good day,

I’ve just created a small guide on the wiki on how to use Jekyll inside a Whonix Workstation. You may find it here: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Working_on_Jekyll_inside_Whonix_Workstation
Will now finishing porting over my code to Jekyll. Shouldn’t take to long and make the whole thing editable.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1 Like

Please don’t use these strange links. These are likely a bug introduced in current mediawiki version. Please use https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Working_on_Jekyll_inside_Whonix_Workstation instead. (upper left → page → page)

Good day,

Ok, thank you, just edited that. Didn’t notice the URL was messed up.

Have a nice day,

Ego

Good day,

Just finished porting everything over to Jekyll. Took longer than anticipated and the mobile mode seems to not work without JS, which is why I had (and still have) to rewrite quite a lot of code.

Thanks to these changes, the site is now editable over prose.io and also uses Github pages as a hoster. You may find it here from now on: http://egobits1.github.io/ Furthermore, here a link to the porse page of it: Prose · A Content Editor for GitHub

Have a nice day,

Ego

2 Likes

Good day,

Just wanted to add that while I will extend this prototype on my own, adding more and more elements and sites, I’d be grateful for any kind of input, both positive and negative, you may have. The aforementioned “showcasing” on the blog for more critique should be possible as well, now that I’ve been able to move to Jekyll as a base and Github for hosting.

Have a nice day,

Ego

I was still waiting for the latest design conclusions being implemented. Most importantly switching to a bright design for the first impression.

Good day,

Right, somewhat lost focus there. Forgot the whole exchange completley while the whole “Jekyll implementation” was done.

Have a nice day,

Ego

1 Like

Good day,

So, after having tried to simplify the basic design of my old concept for a bit, I’ve realized that getting my code into a Jekyll friendly form takes quite some time. Thus, I’ve decided to look into alternative templates/bases which could be used by us to base a new web presence on. My main requirements for such a new template were:

  • Must not be focused on blogging alone.
  • Has to have both a presentable and modern apparence.
  • Must be easily customizable and.
  • Must work when accessed via the TBB on the most strict security settings.
  • Public domain, GPL or MIT license.
  • No JavaScript except for mobile.

Now, the reason for choosing to not exclude JavaScript alltogether is that there is literally not a SINGLE template that solves its “mobile version” without JS. So, that will still have to be “patched” out by hand.

Keeping these six attributes in mind, I went on my journey to find a new template. In the end, the only template capable of meeting all requirements was this one: http://cirrus.cloudvent.net/

Now, looking at it, it is not that much more simple than my current design. So the question whether switching is viable would be appropriate.

Obviously, starting from zero would be possible as well (and probably not take as long as modifying the current design does).

In conclusion, I’d appreciate some input.

Have a nice day,

Ego