General Appearance

The acedb logo

Current logo is OK, but only just about, its too wishy/washy in colour and doesn't really grab you. We need a new, punchier one. Roger of the Web Team should be able to knock us one up.

Navigation buttons

We need a standard set of navigation buttons on each page to allow the user to back track, go to the home page and perhaps to the introductory page of the section they are currently in.

Page layout

We should make use of the web team to design our own top/tailing of our pages to give a standardised appearance, they know how to do all this stuff.

Acedb papers/articles

Should have a standard template for preparing these, just like the Apache docs. Should have a standard header which includes the logo image, etc. etc.

Site layout

Needs completely reworking, its tailored towards developers far too much.

We should have some page hit monitoring to see where people go most often.

We need to add at least the following:

Docs section

The current docs should be hived off into an "old docs" section and we should start again and add only relevant documentation.

We need broad headline groups such as:

A "users" section

This should include items such as:

A new "Showcase" section

There are lots of really good examples of acedb usage around the world. We need to point to these from our web page. These should include yeast, grain and Lincolns DAS project.

On this page we should include:

Downloads page

We desperately need a new and better downloads section, we should have proper pages, not just the directory listing of the ftp site. The pages should be generated by the same script that copies across the latest binaries from the CVS system.

This page should include models files for other databases, e.g. human, worm etc.

There should also be html format install/maintenance files to supercede the README's, there simply isn't enough info.

we should also include some of the acedb tools separately to highlight their existence.

Sylvias tutorials are another good candidate for downloads.

The new FAQ

The acedb FAQ is woeful, truly woeful. It needs completely revamping. As a start we could scan the newsgroup and pick up all the hints/tips from there.

Search index for site

We need to set up our own "Search" entry box which should be shown on all the main navigation pages of the site. The search should be of an Alta-Vista index of our web site and the Acedb Docs web site in the States. This is really important.

As part of this, we should make sure our main pages have "meta-tags" defined that mean that our pages will come out first in other peoples searches on the word "acedb".


Ed Griffiths <edgrif@sanger.ac.uk>
Last modified: Mon Nov 27 08:16:09 GMT 2000