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Wayne Koorts shared an idea in Yola on June 13, 2009 06:15:
General feedback re: Banner Editing and Site Downloads.Hi Yola Team,
I have some general feedback with some light suggestions for extra polish on an already shiny product.
Banner editing:
- I like the Change / Edit Banner and dimension display over the banner but I can't help feeling like they might look slicker if they were instead displayed in a hover-activated overlay so that they're not constantly over the image, as they may be a little in the way on some banners. I think it'd also be really cool if they had some transparency, to maybe about 75% opacity.
- I presume you've called the banner resizing tool the Mask Editor because it will take on further functions at a later stage, but maybe at this stage it could be titled the Banner Editor for clarity?
- I also have a suggestion for a possible change around editing banners with Picnik vs. the Mask Editor. It seems that the banner image can be edited with Picnik, but this can only be accessed via the File Manager (I may be wrong here, I had a look around but couldn't see another way). My suggestion is to either:
a) Rename the Edit Banner button to Resize Banner, and add a third button called Edit Banner which edits the banner with Picnik, or:
b) Leave the buttons as they are and just have a link to the Picnik editor within the Mask Editor.
- I actually can't get the Mask Editor to work properly. When I edit the banner and click OK in the Mask Editor it doesn't seem to load the new image automatically. I either have to go back into the Mask Editor and click OK again, or browse to another page and back again. This is on Windows with Firefox 3.0.11.
- Regarding the Mask Editor's generated images: I noticed that every time I edited the banner a new image was created which shows up in the File Manager. I can see this possibly becoming a problem with lots of tweaking to find just the right size and placement. I'd like to suggest possibly creating just one extra image and giving it a suffix, e.g. originalname_edited.jpg and renaming the original to something like originalname_orig.jpg. To handle this for multiple pages you could extend the suffix to include the page name, e.g. originalname_index_edited.jpg.
Text Widget:
- In the font-family and font-size drop-downs I think it would be handy to pre-tick the default font and size. This might make the first edit easier as you'll know where you're starting from ("I want to make the font a little bigger..." etc.).
Publish My Site -> Download Site:
- I think a nice addition to the download feature would be to rename the .zip file to something more appropriate like sitename_site.zip or sitename_yola.zip
- The README.txt bundled in the download should probably use DOS/Windows style line separators (\r\n) as opposed to Unix-style which it seems to be using now (\n). The only reason I say this is because most Windows users will probably double-click to open the file and will open it in Notepad by default, which doesn't seem to understand plain \n line separations. This means you end up with one long word-wrapped line which destroys the beautiful ASCII banner and doesn't look very nice. This shouldn't affect most other editors as anything above Notepad seems to take different line separator types into account.
That's all for now :-)
Regards,
Wayne-
Wayne Koorts replied on December 16, 2008 03:34 to the idea "A few things, ideas and a bug..." in Yola:
Oh sorry Marije I think we misunderstood each other there, I see what you are saying now :-) I was expecting to see the hyperlink that I had already entered reappear in the Insert Link dialog when I used it a second time on the same text.
I think the need to change an existing hyperlink would be quite common, for example if somebody enters a really long link and then later on discovers that there was a typo in the link it would be nice to be able to go back and just edit what is there already.
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on December 15, 2008 18:26 to the idea "A few things, ideas and a bug..." in Yola:
Thanks Marije,
Hmm, I still can't seem to edit a hyperlink. I have tried on Firefox 3.0.4 and IE 7, both on Windows, and whether I select the whole piece of hyperlinked text (I have made sure that I selected the whole underlined part), or just part of it, or just have the cursor in it, the hyperlink editor just comes up blank every time as if there is no link.
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts shared an idea in Yola on December 15, 2008 09:12:
A few things, ideas and a bug...Hi SynthaSite team,
I've been playing around with the latest changes (and a couple of versions back since I haven't had much playtime :) and I've got a couple of suggestions and noticed a bug:
Bug: The pop-up window for Form Assembly when it's dropped onto the page says "Form Assembly& t r a d e ;" - i.e. the "& t r a d e ;" part is visible.
Bug (not really): OK this isn't so much a bug as my personal (read: pedantic ;-) opinion but I think the tooltip when hovering over the "Favorites Icon" section of the page properties might be more appropriately named "Icon image to display in the browser's address bar" instead of "Icon image to display in the browsers url bar" because I have a feeling more people are probably familiar with the terminology of a website's "address" rather than its "URL".
Text Widget toolbar:
-> I think that the order of the list indentation buttons is a bit illogical. I found that I (which of course might not be the same for everyone) naturally clicked the button on the right of the two to try to increase the indent but in face that is the "indent less" button, with the "indent more" button on the left. I think most word processors also have this the other way around, with "less" on the left and "more" on the right. I think it would also have a more consistent flow as the "undo" and "redo" buttons are in this order, if we compare it that way. Just a thought.
-> I also found that my natural inclination after starting a bullet / number list was to just start typing but actually clicking the bullet / number list button takes the focus away from the text widget. Might be nice to have the focus switch back automatically to the text widget, what do you think?
-> Right-click menu. It would be nice if there was a right-click menu to allow the user to contextually access some of the functions on the toolbar to take action on the selected text. Specifically around hyperlinks I think this might be appreciated.
-> Ability to remove hyperlinks from text. I've found it useful in the past to have a separate toolbar button to remove the hyperlink from selected text, besides what is now available with the "None" button in the hyperlink editor. In fact it would be great if editing or removing a hyperlink could be done just by have the cursor placed inside the hyperlink, i.e. you wouldn't have to have the whole hyperlink text highlighted. That would be nice and sleek :) On this note I think another neat little touch might be to have a tooltip appear when a link is moused-over which displays the hyperlink.
-> Incidentally I couldn't find a way to actually edit a hyperlink - is there a function for this somewhere? Although "None" in the "Insert Link" dialog does force the selected text to have no hyperlink it doesn't seem to actually show the hyperlink of the selected text. I think this would be a reasonably common need.
"Insert Link" dialog:
-> For the "Page" and "File" options in this dialog I think it might be more intuitive to replace the text field / browse button combinations with just one button which says "Select Page..." and "Select / Update File..." respectively. The radio buttons would stay as they are.
Thanks guys, I love the blog facilities by the way!
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on September 21, 2008 06:41 to the question "Is it possible...?" in Yola:
Hi John,
It is possible to password protect individual pages on your site, but the username and password can only be set by you; users can't set their own.
The following FAQ entry has instructions on how to use the password protection feature:
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
Regards,
Wayne -
A comment on the idea "Widgetbox Gallery, usability, password protected pages" in Yola:
Ah, ok didn't think to look there, thanks Marije :-) – Wayne Koorts, on September 19, 2008 03:59 -
Wayne Koorts shared an idea in Yola on September 19, 2008 01:00:
Widgetbox Gallery, usability, password protected pagesHi all,
I've just been playing with the Widgetbox Gallery widget and it's quite neat overall, it certainly opens up a portal to a whole new dimension of plug and play add-ons.
I have a few comments, and some ideas that hopefully might help to make it even more user-friendly:
- Firstly the name of the icon in the sidebar may not give a particularly clear indication of what its purpose is, i.e. to let one browse a "Gallery" of widgets. For those that know what the Widgetbox website is about it might be perfect, but I think maybe it's worth considering changing the wording to something like "Widgetbox Widget Browser", indicating that upon dropping it opens up a further browser, possibly even with the classic indicative ellipses on the end, i.e. "Widgetbox Widget Browser...". Maybe even just "Widgetbox Widget..."
- The first time I tried to edit a widget which I had added via the Gallery I clicked on the widget, then opened up the properties sidebar and expected to see its properties there. I only say this to share my particular first encounter with that functionality, which is not to say it's necessarily like anyone else's :) I understand that there's probably a practical limitation with trying to integrate the edit functions of the Widgetbox Gallery interface into your own native interface, which I assume may be partly why you've kept it separate...? What about just having an "Edit..." button on the properties tab which launches the same edit window as clicking "Edit" in the widget title in the layout pane? I'm just thinking it might be nice to have an additional entry point.
With my next couple of comments I will assume that I am referring to areas of the Widgetbox Gallery plugin that you guys actually can change, I'm not sure how custom an implementation you have implemented or are allowed to implement as far as what Widgetbox provides.
- When adding a widget, some of them have two "Get Widget" buttons (a big one in the top right corner of the window, and a small one in the bottom right), and some don't. Some that do: Google Maps, FriendFeed Widget, Pandora Station List. Some that don't: Back
Full Size Synth Piano, Google Search. Looks like it may have something to do with the size / amount of properties available for a given widget.
- Are all of the Widgetbox widgets available in the Gallery widget? It seems a bit odd how they are categorised, with only a handful being in all of the categories except for the Favorites category, which seems to hold about 70,000 widgets judging by the amount of pages. Is widget categorisation done by the Widgetbox people? Or by the widget contributors maybe?
On an unrelated topic, with the new Password Protection feature for pages, is there a way to edit the username and password for a page? I couldn't find it anywhere so just wondering... if there isn't then maybe a good place for this would be in the page properties sidebar, beneath Favorites Icon. Another possibility (or additionally) could be in the menu editor, where password protected "menu items" could have the username and password fields in the little "Settings" expander.
Keep up the good work guys!
:)
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on September 08, 2008 02:17 to the question "Using phrases as keywords in Synthasite" in Yola:
Hi Bengo,
According to the topic below you can seperate terms by using commas, so theoretically you should be able to do something like the following:
superhero, comic book, drawing, collectors
so anything seperated by commas would be treated as a single term.
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on September 08, 2008 02:12 to the question "How to make your own page style, or customize a page style??" in Yola:
Hi Francis115,
Complete custom themes are not yet available in SynthaSite, but I believe the good folks at SynthaSite are hard at work in making themes more customisable. See the following FAQ for details:
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
They also give you details on what you can do currently for customising your site (such as adding a different banner image or using a different colour scheme).
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on September 08, 2008 02:08 to the question "Can I edit text with Transmit, rather than editing and redownloading the whole website again?" in Yola:
Hi Ozma,
The best and safest way to do this is the long way, i.e. editing the site in the SynthaSite editor, downloading it and then re-uploading it. The difference between the Weebly and SynthaSite site downloads is that Weebly gives the site in HTML and SynthaSite provides a set of PHP files so they will look quite different.
The content is in there if you know where to look and if you definitely would like to go that route then have a look in the site structure that gets downloaded as follows:
site.zip -> Site Name folder -> definitions -> page name (e.g. index) folder -> page.inc.php
That PHP file will contain the content for that page and technically I don't think there's anything that will stop you from making changes to the raw PHP file, as long as it's nothing major like adding a new widget or anything like that but I'm sure that minor changes to the text etc. should work fine.
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on September 08, 2008 01:54 to the question "I am finished editing my site (for now) and I would like to publish it on the web. How do I do that?" in Yola:
Hi glen,
Please take a look at this link in the FAQ, it explains in detail how to get your site listed with a search engine:
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
Also see the following page for advice on how to get more traffic to your site:
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on July 16, 2008 19:07 to the discussion "New version, more general feedback." in Yola:
Thanks for the reply Michael. It's one of those cases where different users will always want slightly different functionality and user interface. Of course the functions that one needs also depend on the particular website in question.
Here's an idea that might intuitively help this situation:
- What about having an additional tab, to the right of the Page tab that holds "My Frequently Used Functions" (except you'd call it something shorter and funkier of course ;-) ? This tab would hold the most commonly used functions for the active user from left to right in the context bar, from most used to least used. You might keep about five in the list, I suppose depending on what screen resolution the UI is based on. Implementing it should hopefully be a case of just a counter that runs up on each tab function which then populates the tab as it goes. It would up to SynthaSite as to what functions overall count as "favouritables".
People will probably go straight to that tab eventually and will naturally end up spending most of their editing time on that tab.
- The other option for this tab, instead of populating it automatically, could be to allow users to drag-and-drop any function onto that tab thereby creating their own "favourite functions" list.
I guess it will never be an easy choice of what to have on what page and there will always be people that like it and others that dislike it. The real task of course is to figure out first of all if there IS a big calling for something to be done a certain way and then do that.
Maybe you guys should really be hiring a psychologist... ;-)
Regards,
Wayne -
A comment on the question "Please help" in Yola:
Ah, we must be on at the same time, the comments weren't showing so I had to do a full reply but you obviously saw the first one! LOL – Wayne Koorts, on July 16, 2008 07:36 -
Wayne Koorts replied on July 16, 2008 07:34 to the question "Please help" in Yola:
Ruth I've found that with GetSatisfaction you need to comment out your HTML code that you use in these text fields because it seems to interpret some HTML now. Just put <!-- before the start and --> at the end and that should do the trick :-)
Regards,
Wayne -
A comment on the question "I am finished editing my site (for now) and I would like to publish it on the web. How do I do that?" in Yola:
Andrea I have just posted a reply to the original topic which you raised with this query, please take a look there as there are some suggestions for fixing this. – Wayne Koorts, on July 16, 2008 00:46 -
Wayne Koorts replied on July 16, 2008 00:44 to the question "Why is it showing "404 Error" whenever I click on my URL???" in Yola:
Hi Andrea,
Could you please tell us the link of your site?
Also I have found the following topic which was recently asked and replied to by Monique with some suggestions which sounds very similar to the issue you are having:
http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on July 15, 2008 01:26 to the question "make "contact me" link" in Yola:
Hi Aidan,
Assuming you are using a text widget, just type "contact me" where you want it in the text, highlight it with the cursor, click on the "Insert Link" button on the toolbar (10th icon from the left, looks like a little piece of a chain) then click E-Mail on the pop-up and just type in your email address.
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts started a conversation in Yola on July 12, 2008 05:36:
New version, more general feedback.Hi SynthaSite Team,
I've been playing with the new version and I have to say overall I'm impressed with the sleek new interface. It's good to see that the menu bar has dissolved into the main interface and I'm glad to see that the content sidebar can be hidden on request. I also like the theme preview of sites the user has done just after logging in and before loading the IDE.
I've sub-divided the rest of my feedback into categories, because there is a fair bit ;-)
Perceived bugs / errors:
- On the "Choose Style" dialog after creating a site the numbered sections are incorrect. They are still numbered "2: Choose a Style" and "3: Select Colors" as per the initial site creation screen. There is no "1".
- With the default call-to-action image, if you don't see the sidebar and you then click on the "If you don't see the sidebar, click here" link it does show the sidebar but it doesn't toggle the "Show Content Sidebar" button. I.e. you click the link and the sidebar shows, but the button above still says "Show Content Sidebar".
- The "About" dialog still shows "v2.2.5" - is this correct?
- Grammatical error on the "Edit Menu" dialog: "Drag and drop the pages of your site into, or out of your sites menu." there is a missing apostrophe on the second "sites", i.e. it should be "Drag and drop the pages of your site into, or out of your site's menu.".
- On the content sidebar the widget category icons seem to change colour after you've clicked them. Is this intentional? For example see the following screenshot where I have browsed into the bottom three categories:
http://www.wkoorts.com/files/synthasi...
General suggestions:
- I think that the sidebar should more generically named, so instead of "Content Sidebar" I think it might be more appropriate to call it just "Sidebar". That is complete personal preference though and I may well me the only person in the world who feels that way ;-)
- I think what might be a nice efficiency enhancer would be if you click on a widget on your page that the sidebar automatically changes to the properties tab for that widget. If the sidebar is hidden then do nothing, unless you can code it in such a way that it actually does change to the properties tab but stays hidden anyway (I'm guessing this happens anyway through div hiding or something).
Reasonably major UI changes:
I'm going to propose some pretty bold changes here, so please feel free to shrug them off as appropriate :-)
1) I think that the IDE header can be done away with entirely. It seems to basically be there at the moment to accommodate three items: the SynthaSite logo, "Current Site" settings manager and the "Close / Help" buttons. I have some suggestions to integrate these items into the rest of the interface while still maintaining intuitive functionality:
1.1) SynthaSite logo. I think this can be removed altogether as the SynthaSite name is already in the window title so it is ever-present anyway and the logo itself is already the favicon so the presence of both of these items is maintained throughout the IDE.
1.2) Current Site section. I feel that this can be integrated into the Site Manager tab, and here's how I would propose it happens:
1.2.1) All of the functionality provided by the "Current Site" drop-down is already available ont he Site Manager tab with the exception only of a link to the file manager, which could be added to the context bar (toolbar beneath the tabs).
1.2.2) The other primary function of this section of the header is to show the current (active) site's name. I think this could be added to the window title next to "SynthaSite".
1.2.3) Along with these changes I think the interface could be streamlined further by removing the four buttons to the right of the tabs and integrating those functions into the context bar (see screenshot links below). This will also allow for much easier expansion of the number of tabs later on. If you really want to keep the SynthaSite logo and name in the IDE as mentioned earlier then you will also now have more space on either side of the tabs if you want to add it in there instead.
1.3) Close and Help buttons. These can be lowered to the same line as the tabs.
1.4) I have created some images with the changes I am proposing. To see before and after shots of what I am proposing for the Site Manager tab please see the below two images:
Before: http://www.wkoorts.com/files/synthasi...
After: http://www.wkoorts.com/files/synthasi...
2) Page tab:
2.1) As mentioned above I would apply the same removal of the four buttons alongside the tabs. To accommodate this in the case of this tab you could add a "New Page" button to the start of the context bar. I wouldn't add the "Change Style" or "Publishing" options to this page as I think they are more overall site management functions than page editing functions and I think it might be more intuitive to keep these two primary functions separated, although I think "Edit Menu" can stay on this page.
2.2) I have also created modified screenshots of my propositions for changes on the Page tab:
Before: http://www.wkoorts.com/files/synthasi...
After: http://www.wkoorts.com/files/synthasi...
That's it for now, I'm keen to hear what you think of these suggestions.
Regards,
Wayne -
Wayne Koorts replied on June 30, 2008 03:32 to the question "Log in trouble" in Yola:
Hi Rjun,
What happens when you try to log in? Do you get an error message at all?
Regards,
Wayne -
A comment on the question "Centering images with css?" in Yola:
Awesome, glad it worked :) – Wayne Koorts, on June 30, 2008 01:59
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