

VideoLAN launches new website - ashraful
http://www.videolan.org

======
jedsmith
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.

 _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.

~~~
jbk
Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the
designer gets some visibility. This is normal...

And this is temporary...

About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what? Small steps for
iterations...

Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...

~~~
jedsmith
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).

~~~
ashraful
Hi. I am the designer of the website.

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.

~~~
jedsmith
> 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.

~~~
jbk
> 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.

------
meemo
The "made by" tag looks unprofessional. As if the website designer is as
important as his customer.

~~~
jbk
Great. We are not professional.

------
beoba
The huge "MADE BY X" in the header is a bit overkill

------
albertzeyer
A bit OT:

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.

~~~
coffeedrinker
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.

I've never been able to find the root cause.

~~~
albertzeyer
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.

But I never tried it on Windows.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Same story, use better video drivers and an updated version of VLC. VLC with
vdpau on my system screams.

------
Entlin
Too many traffic cones.

~~~
shawnlower
10 years, and I still don't know what the deal is with the fscking cones...

~~~
sp332
The cone was a placeholder/warning for early builds. By the time it got
stable, everyone recognized the cone = VLC and they decided not to change it.

------
tagfolder
Looks nice, I hope they will also improve design of vlc player soon. :)

~~~
jbk
I am working on that, but it is quite hard...

If you have any insightful ideas, ("it isn't pretty" isn't one), please mail
me...

------
matthew-wegner
The line spacing makes things quite hard to read. What's going on here?
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.48%20AM.png)

And on other pages columns are quite constrained, which makes for ridiculous
word spacing with justification:
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/173540/Screens/Screen%20shot%202011-02-02%20at%2011.56.28%20AM.png)

~~~
jbk
Totally agree. Any idea so we can improve it?

~~~
lancer383
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.

~~~
jbk
[http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Web...](http://svn.videolan.org/filedetails.php?repname=VideoLAN+Websites&path=%2Fwww.videolan.org%2Fstyle%2Fstyle.css.in)

------
endergen
Does anyone know if they are going to put more effort into their VLC browser
plugin?

I tried it a few months ago and it only work semi decently in Chrome on
Windows. For Mac it was totally broken.

~~~
jbk
Well, we thought <video> was going to work a bit more, so we didn't work on
the plugins at all...

But seeing the current mess, maybe we should :D

------
jhonnycano
Cool, I Like it !

------
runningdogx
They're finally displaying the version number on the download button! That was
my main gripe with the old site.

~~~
jbk
Well, the old site was confusing in many aspects.

The documentation and support was impossible to find and it was almost
impossible to maintain...

Of course, this is a first step and we need to improve; but we are C/C++
developers on our free time, not web developers...

