Help needed: Web Design

News posted on Sun, 2006-08-06 04:00

Please help us create a nice theme for our new website which is based on Drupal, a popular community-oriented content management system with emphasize on navigation based on tags and relations instead of a static page tree.

The website's structure is already in place (it's what you see in front of you). All we need is a nice theme.

You may add a smaller quick-links navbar for some of the main navigation entries (e.g.: Donate and Contact), but you are free to use any scheme you like. Try to make navigation as easy and obvious as possible.

In addition to the above requirements we have a little wish list for our theme:

  • CSS-based
  • use relative font size, so your theme behaves well on browsers with bigger default fonts
  • use an easily readable font (hint: sans-serif) and font size (not too small)
  • highlight the active navigation entry
  • professional look (we don't want BeOS window tabs in the navbar ;)
  • it would be nice if your theme looked good on widescreen displays (use the available screen space effectively), but it should also support 800x600 resolution

You will probably want to use the Haiku logos in our repository. Please submit your work including a screenshot to the Haiku mailing list.

Why Drupal?

Some of you might wonder why we suddenly changed our mind about Plone and RailFrog. Well, Plone hosting is too expensive because Plone is very resource-hungry and requires a powerful server with root access. RailFrog is progressing too slowly for us and we do not want to wait for the perfect CMS, anymore.

Also, when we tried to create the page tree for our website we faced a few limits because some information does not fit into only one category and our content will have to appear in many places on our website. For instance, article posts (newsletters) may at the same time be tutorials. As mentioned in the first paragraph, Drupal has a few interesting navigation concepts and it allows our users to get involved in content creation which is exactly what we need.