Talk:Main Page/Layout design/Archive 1

New colour layout

I just wanted to say: ... wow! Fantasy :-)

Yeah, it looks much better than the old one Whkoh 15:04 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Agreed JasonM 17:07 3 Jul 2003 (GMT)

Hmm. Well, as they say, it takes all sorts... ;-) Personally, I find it garish. But I suppose I'll have to live with it -- James F. 16:37 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why should you have to live with it? It looks astoundingly amateurish. --The Cunctator 21:40 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Oh garishness! Oh luridness!. Perhaps I may be deemed blandish, but I deeply feel Wikipedia should be unimpeded by graphics & color. This being an encyclopedia, we should give solely what the researchers expect: substance. Looks pretty cool though! Usedbook 18:24 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I say the colors suck. ours is much better. -- TomK32 19:17 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It doesn't look bad, but it sends the wrong message IMHO. Wiki is about content, and colour and formatting should be used only when absolutely needed. Colour and fancy layout should be done in themes, not hard-coded into the database.

Is there any chance we could have a vote on whether to change it back? -- stewacide 19:24 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm against a vote, we should try to find a reasonable compromise first. The colors we currently have are somewhat logical: The yellow of the community box represents the background on the community pages. The blue of the articles box is the blue that will soon be used for the Table of Contents boxes above articles. The red/pink for the Selection will be our "general" color for highlighting certain boxes, e.g. on Recent Changes. I like the colors a lot, and I think people should try to get used to them for a few days before calling for another change. --Eloquence 23:26 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree. The layout is beginning to really grow on me. The TOC and special page bit is interesting, however I chose blue because it symbolizes hyperlinks and the red hue because it symbolizes red/edit links and the constantly unfinished nature of our project. IMO red, blue and yellow should be our official colors and should be in or logo. --mav

Brilliant redesign of the front page. Far more professional. It makes wiki's front page look like a properly laid out professionally designed encyclopædia. I find the suggestion that it is sending out the "wrong message" perverse. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Encyclopedia Briittanica use colour? And World Book? And every other modern twenty-first century encyclopædia? And of course colour and "fancy layout" should be hard-coded into the database; it is called branding; creating a clear and recognisable brand visual. That's how an twenty-first century encyclopædia should look, not like a 1980s pre DTP cut and paste job. Full marks to those responsible for a great great job. BTW sorry to TomK32 but all I can say to ours is mega yuch! Sooooooo 1990s. :-) FearÉIREANN 23:28 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I thought the idea of Wikipedia was to design a great, copywrite-free encyclopedia - not a great webpage. Hardcoding formatting and layout may make Wikipedia.org look better and more "profesional" (something that should be done with "themes" IMHO), but it also makes it far less portable.

What if, for example, someone wanted to leverage the Wikipedia datebase for a non-webpage application (e.g. a stand-alone encyclopedia application, a device-specicfic version for cellphones or the like, a printed version, etc.)? Also, what if the Wikipedia developers get around to making the site fully skinable? Hardcoding web-specific HTML formatting makes these things much harder or impossible when they don't have to be.

The #1 most important web innovation of the 21st century (IMHO) is the idea of seperating content from formatting (see: css, xml, etc.). This is a step backwards in that respect. -- stewacide 01:15 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I could not disagree more. One of wiki's most dramatic flaws has been its poor use of layout, inadequate use of images and overall a look that has made it look like an amateur attempt at an encyclopædia. That was perfectly understrandable as that was what wiki was, an amateur attempt at an encyclopædia. But with the growth in the number and range of contributors and in the scope of articles, wikipedia is now a serious sourcebook and that fact has to be clear the moment someone sets eyes on a wiki page. If in the first five seconds a reader forms the opinion that (a) we are unreliable fact-wise, or (b) even if we have the facts we would bore them rigid communicating the facts, they will be gone with one click of a mouse and all the work by all the people who wrote and continue to wrote wiki will be wasted.

The previous front page looked (a) dated, (b) reader-unfriendly, and (c) targeted at academics. Those three characteristics if perpetuated would kill wiki stone dead. It has to communicate the fact that it reader-friendly, and it is no good relying on words to communicate that. Before someone reads a letter let alone a word, they will have formed an opinion on wiki based on the visual product in front of them. That is why EB and World Book have spent so much redesigning their hardcopy versions and and why they treat the visual look of their computer-based versions as central. Get the look wrong and the message it sends to a reader who is not sure whether to use it or go elsewhere, is either 'by God but we are going to bore you rigid' or 'we are an encyclopædia. We don't want you if you are just some schoolkid scanning the net for stuff. We are for serious people, not you.' EB and WB and all the others know that. Getting wiki's visual look right is nothing to do with play-acting at web page design. It is about the basic requirement of every single publication, book, magazine, internet site, absolutely everything. Image contextualises the product and if you get the image wrong, you screw up the product.

In fact this page redesign must be the first step in putting together a full graphic package. Among other things that should require one corporate logo, not the different ones on different bits of wiki, an absolutely uniform visual look everywhere, to give a visual and corporate unity to a text which is slowly being brought together and unified in its form of communication. Until recently many longer articles were so text-heavily and image-light that even PhD students would take a deep breath before tackling them; try reading Abortion and see if you can get to the end without dying of boredom. Major rewriting, editing, adding in headings, images, captions etc had now made wiki far far more user friendly. Thankfully a similar process is now being applied to the front page, which if done well will entise people in, not frighten people away. FearÉIREANN 04:49 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't disagree that Wikipedia should look better and be more standardized. What I'm pointing out is that hardcoding HTML is entirely the wrong way to go about it. It's very unlikely, for example, that the fancy layout on the EB or WB online editions are hand/hard coded HTML. Rather, they're "themes" applied to content extracted from a database. Wikipedia is only going to start looking better and being more standardized if we adopt a similar strategy starting with the software that runs Wikipedia.

For example, instead of using tables and other HTML tricks to place images in articles, it would be easier, make more sense, look more consistent, and be more portable if a Wiki' shorthand was developed for associating images with paragraphs of text, and associating captions with immages (see: [1] (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_pages)). That way the Wikipedia software can worry about how to lay out the image and the page, and us Wikipedians can worry about the content. It may end up being more work for the programmers, but I think it's much better to have a programmer do something once, than for us to do it a million times on every page.

Untill a more intelegent "engine" is developed that can do fancy formatting and layout in a standardized and portable way, I think it's best that we keep things simple. -- stewacide 07:41 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"[I]t's much better to have a programmer do something once, than for us to do it a million times on every page." Um, I hate to say it but we don't have 150 billion images. I think you overestimate the conversion costs, and the cost of continuing to do what we're doing. It could be years before we have decent software. I think it's well worthwhile at least having a decent main page in the meantime. Additionally, software doesn't just pop out of a big black box marked "SOFTWARE MACHINE" -- future hard-coded designs could be based on the HTML hacking we are doing now. -- Tim Starling 08:21 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

These colors look awful. Wikipedia doesn't need lame pastels to help it. --The Cunctator

What if only the encyclopedia topic had the pastel inbehind, the rest, is left plain. That would draw attention to the most crucial section for browsing, and not present the eye with such an array of colours? - user:zanimum

I agree with James F., Usedbook, TomK32, stewacide, and The Cunctator. (As you've probably guessed from my edit last night, if you saw it.) The new design is a Bad Thing. I have seen uglier pages on the Web, but they're mostly by teenagers who have just discovered HTML for the first time and are eager to try out every colour they can think of, all on the same page, just for the the hell of it. So when are we getting the flashing heading, scrolling footnotes, and those cool pictures that follow your mouse around the screen when you move it? Ahem. I mean, why can't we just stick to elegant simplicity? Is there a reason for adding these background colours, or is it just that it looks "cool"? -- Oliver P. 00:59 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I also dislike the new design and don't see the point in it - I certinaly don't agree with FearÉIREANN that the old design was dated (how can plain text be dated? maybe I should get my Shakespeare out and attack it with some watercolours...) or reader unfriendly or anything like that. Putting pastel coloured boxes around things doesn't make them easier to mentally parse anyway. If somebody edited an article so that one paragraph was in a red font, the next in blue and the next in green, I expect it would be changed back without much fuss, so why are we slapping colour around in a similarly pointless way on the main page? On a more personal note, I hate pastel shades in general (they're alright for toilet paper, I guess), and didn't really like it when the current division of the main page into two vertical parts arrived (this probably makes me certifiably insane, I know). That said, I'm not going to make a big deal out of this (unless I get into a really bad mood). Mumble grumble--Camembert

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First, let's be clear: the current pastel colors are a bit too soft for my taste as well. I liked the original new design [2] (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&oldid=1108872). But I can live with the current version, and I think it's a good basis to work on, and still an improvement upon the black and white scheme.

It's hard to argue about taste, so ultimately, an opinion poll will probably be used to decide what we do. But please keep in mind that if you vote for the old version, it is very unlikely that a color experiment will be tried again, and we will probably be stuck in black and white for months, if not years. On the other hand, if you vote for the new one, we can always think about improving upon the colors.

Why I think colors are important:

• We already use them. Right on this page -- check the background color. This yellowish color has been there since the Phase III upgrade, and it has never really been linked to any concept. The new Main Page links it to the general concept of "Community", and if you think about it, that's what most of the yellowish pages are about (except for the image pages, which should probably be white anyway).
• Similarly, our taxonomy, physics and chemistry boxes have had color for quite a while. This helps in identifying them as a separate part of the page, or in highlighting particular sections of the respective box. The colors we agree upon for the Main Page can be used consistently throughout Wikipedia. If properly done, this gives our site an additional level of logic that helps people to navigate it.
• Our current Main Page says to the visitor: Here there be text. Text, text, text. Oh, and we also have some text. If you look at the logo, you will notice that it contains text. This symbolizes the fact that we like text. Right below the logo there's some navigational text, and to the right, there's some more text, and a text box that, when expanded, contains text. Below that is the welcome text, followed by the two text boxes that contain the text categories to view the text on our site.

I think it's time that those of us who like brilliant pictures can try to attract others who do. Wikipedia is certainly a text-centric community, and our dislike for all things "fancy" reflects this. But we need pictures, and people who are good at creating pictures are often not identical to those who are good at creating text. For example, I think almost completely in fully phrased sentences -- almost never in pictures (hence the username). And although I like beautiful imagery, I'm terrible at creating it. The people I know who aren't would be scared away by our old, text-heavy Main Page layout. Granted, colors are not pictures, but for a visual person, they convey information and, more importantly, emotions. One emotion they convey (besides "Have I still got any toilet paper left?") is "You like colors? You like pictures? Come on in, there's more of it in here." And I think that's an emotion we have neglected to convey in the past. An encyclopedia is a collection of all human knowledge, in different forms. We have various galleries, great public domain pictures, a lot of fair use images and so on. Our old Main Page design was therefore misleading. We have color. We have images. We should make this clear to those who visit us.

• Colors are not unprofessional. That's a red herring and you all know it. Every professional website we are competing with uses colors and images extenssively. Colors are a fundamental part of professional, usable web site design as anyone with a bit of experience can tell you. Now, if you don't like the current colors, say so. But don't condemn us to a colorless existence because reverting is easier than improving.
• The argument that "design should not be hardcoded into the database" is also a weak one. It is not any more "hardcoded" than our article text is "hardcoded". It was collaboratively created in the wiki process, whereas the skins are PHP files written and developed by individuals (e.g. Cologne Blue is almost entirely the work of Magnus Manske). We should continue to work together on the designs that we use instead of leaving it to the programmers to decide how our pages look. Skins should only specify navigational and basic layout elements, not fundamental aspects of a page's look. The right approach to replace HTML is a template system like the one described here (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wikitech-l&m=105557077500936&w=2). That could easily interact with the skins, with a different template specified for each skin.

If you want some colors, but not necessarily our current ones, please do vote for the current version, and help us improve it. --Eloquence 03:30 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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i'll voice off here. mostly i have used the "links" browser to browse and edit wikipedia; so perhaps i am the wrong person to express an opinion, since the change would not apply to "links" anyway. i have a very pov view of the matter anyway. gui bad command line good. call me the old guard. only colors that are good are amber and phosphorous green. :-P -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 07:55 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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The problem is that there is simply too much information on the page. I propose that we move the "encyclopedia" and the "community" columns off the main page. The help page, which is linked from the first paragraph of the main page, mirrors most of the links in the "community" column. The "encyclopedia" section could be merged (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Merphant/sandbox&oldid=1114824) with Wikipedia:Category schemes, which is a short article that duplicates the "Other category schemes" heading at the bottom of the main page. This would greatly simplify the layout. -- Merphant 08:55 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree, so I would propose a Google-like (just a try) design:

• When I open Wikipedia, I look for knowledge. I "Search". So the Search Box should be in the middle of the page, the most important thing.
• A Button for the current, the "Extended Homepage" can give people more information, if they want to.

Effects:

• faster load,
• faster search,
• people know immediately that Wikipedia is about Finding information,
  • not a chatroom,
  • not a talk-tool
  • not a news-collection...

Fantasy 09:31 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

move the "encyclopedia" and the "community" columns off the main page

thirded. The most useful part of the main page is the quick summary of recently updated articles. Our front page should be like that of a newspaper, or some other continuously updated resource. Let's have some more space given over to new articles, or articles in the news. Heck, why not have a daily "featured article"? That's the sort of thing that will have people bookmarking wikipedia's front page and regularly browsing to it. A static list of categories? Not going to impress... Martin 16:07 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You got in better words what I wanted to say, Thanks, Fantasy ;-)

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Yes, the new look is better, but the white background should go too and we should have a colour theme: i.e., it is good design to have a single colour family with a single contrasting colour. For example, a very pale green wash over the entire background, boxes picked out in one or at most two darker shades of the same colour, and (if needed for highlights) a contrasting but compatable second colour (yellows and golds go well with greens). Note that green is just an example: you can choose any base colour you like - blue, brown, grey, whatever - but whichever one you choose, the other backgrounds should be variations of it, not completely different colours. Tannin 14:39 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Good gods, are you crazy? ;-)

Seriously, I generally ignore websites with much use of colour, as it suggests that it's been taken over or is run by people who believe in form over substance. All good websites use white backgrounds (yes, this is a generalisation, I admit). Going even further in the direction of Noddy's toy-land is not what we should be doing. This is a proper web-site, not one that is meant to capture the limited attention-span of someone who doesn't care.

-- James F. 16:56 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You may ignore websites which use colour, JF, but the vast majority of people run a mile from pages that don't. The old front page sent out the unambiguous message - by God are we going to bore you rigid. The old version should be called the insomniacs version because it was a complete turn off, liable to put you to sleep. Luckily I came on wiki through a google search, not the front page. If I had seen the old front page I would have run a mile from wiki and when I did see the front page for the first time, my immediate reaction was an unambiguous yuch and a decision not to go there again. (I have only begun going there since becoming a sysop.) It had a ridiculous amount of text, no appeal, nothing attractive, nothing to make all but a minority of net users want to go any further. Even now it has far too much text and need to lose a lot of it. Any page that looks like a pre DTP hot metal page is dead in the water. Even Britain's conservative Daily Telegraph has realised that it needs better larger pictures and more front page colour to attract readers and is undergoing a redesign. If extensive use of colour is good enough for the Telegraph, why is it a problem on a net-based encyclopædia? FearÉIREANN 17:53 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If you look at their site (http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk), however, you'll see that the only colour on the front page, excluding hyperlinks, are the adverts (which they don't create, and which for some reasons are guided by the concept that garish is better). The use of grey backgrounds allows clear differentiation of seperate sections of information, and yet is understated and 'clean'. I'm not advocating using no formatting or colouration, merely that using large blocks of colour, rather than neat thin lines, to differentiate sections is just ridiculous. See also The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/), The FT (http://news.ft.com/home/uk), The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/), The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/), &c. All of these sites, like the Wikipedia, are primarily text-based information sources, all have spent lots of money on their sites' designs, and they all are understated. If you want garish websites, you can go the tabloids' sites, but surely you don't suggest that Wikipedia should try to align itself with such 'news' sources?

-- James F. 18:49 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

FCOL JF, they have to use a standard broadsheet look in terms of colour-scheme because it is part of their overall corporate identity. Wiki doesn't and would be exceedingly stupid to do so, because we are not a newspaper we are an encyclopædia. By no strength of the imagination is the front page garish. If anything its main problem is FAR to much content crammed in. All I am suggesting is that wiki stop looking like an amateur cut and paste pre-DTP document on its front page and start applying the professionalism it is trying to achieve in its content to its corporate identity and graphics style. The front page has long been an embarrassment. It failed just about every rule of professional layout - from its use primarily of black and white in a medium dominated by colour use, to having too much tightly packed text. Colour allows a heavy page to be made less heavy by categorising the page. That is basic design. Question might be raised about the page colours chosen, ie as they too pastel, but the principle behind their use is blatently obvious and advocating their non use is the design equivalent of complaining about the use of the car and championing the use of the horse instead. The next task is to severly cull the amount of text. There is too much, meaning that what is there is drowned by everything else and nothing makes an impact on the potential reader. And that is what the front page is there for, to make an impact on the reader, not to have them reacting "what the hell is that?" which is how they would react to the old page, with its dreary look, its 'by god are we going to bore you' construction, its over-use of text, its underuse of design and colour. Getting the black and white mentality out of wiki is crucial if it is to be taken seriously as a net encyclopædia, not an insomniac's dream. FearÉIREANN 19:21 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I merely cited broadsheets because 'you started it'. :-) However, quite to the contrary, I would agree with you that the case of broadsheet website design is primarily ruled by corporate identity - they've worked out what looks sensible and clear and aids reading of intelligent pieces of discourse. I'm reticent to accuse you of tabloidisation, but do you think the use of pink paper for the FT not translating across to the web medium is because they don't care for their 150-year-old 'corporate identity', or because large-scale use of colour online is not beneficial? (FYI, they used to have the background colour set to their particular form of pale pink, but got rid of it a few years ago.)

I think that we're not ever going to agree here - you seem to disagree with me on fundamental levels of the principles of design: colour is not the be-all and end-all of sectioning, and in most cases detracts the attention from the content. Stylistic sectioning is not only less obtrusive, but more accessable (text-to-speech browsers often section by layout, but rarely if ever by colour) and uses the principles of progressive disclosure, physical analogy, web-site consistency, and uses expectations and stereotypes to advance the immediate sub-concious understanding of the structure of the data presented; people do not need to read bits text to understand that, say, the largest column with the most information is probably going to be the most important - it is instinctive. I suggest we just drop the discussion, as it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

I do agree with you that the current Main Page is perhaps a little overloaded with information, but I don't think that the way it has be coloured in as if the contents of some eclectic 4-year-old's drawing book helps in this respect in the slightest

Oh, and riding is so much more fun (and almost certainly better for the environment) than driving ;-)

-- James F. 19:52 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You are right about one thing; we are unlikely to agree. All textual products have two types of readers. Those who purposely choose to read it, and so are primarily focused on text and those who are openminded about going further. In the latter case, their opinions, positive or negative, are formed within 5 seconds. How they judge their response is shaped not primarily by text (unless it is of such a size and scale, as in a headline, that it immediately grabs their attention) but on whether the overall look meets with their expectations and arouses their interest to look further. What they expect depends on the nature of the product. A religious person will baulk at seeing a page of the bible in courier font, because that font is never ever used in religious texts. Given its 1960s feel, generally ugliness and its alien feel in a bible context, it would be guaranteed to drive away all but the most committed potential readers. Similarly putting a newspaper into italics, a broadsheet into tabloid style, a tabloid intro broadsheet style is guaranteed to cause potential readers to walk away in droves, not because a newspaper text in italics would necessarily be ugly but because it wouldn't "look like a newspaper". (The Irish Times caused chaos with its readership some months ago simply by changing its font. Though the content was the same, it no longer looked like the way the reader expected and that became a big barrier that it took months and a lot of advertising to overcome.)

In wiki's case it is a net-based encyclopædia. A design that looks hardcopy based by definition is wrong because the people who came to it come from a different medium, the net, that uses different visual stimulæ and layout. As with all other text-based sourcebooks, it has two forms of potential reader: people chasing up information (most of whom would through google searches go straight to a page not the main page) and those who find wiki, hit its first page and are faced with the simple question which is usually answered in 5 seconds, will I or won't I go further? As anyone who has ever laid out a document knows, the first reaction is formed from the overall page en bloc, not a detailed analysis of its contents. If the page is unfriendly, uninviting, too textual, too bland or too heavily, the vast majority of readers in those five seconds will instantly make up their minds and almost always make it up in the negative, and go elsewhere. (As a political consultant I have designed and laid out 11 advertorials; some were broadsheet in design and targeted at a broadsheet reader, others tabloid.)

In grabbing the potential reader's attention, colour is vital. The new page for example in using three colours sends the instant message that there are three aspects to wiki; up to date information, encyclopædia entries and a community behind wiki. As many potential readers may be attracted to one of those categories, allowing their eyes to focus on one area (each area clearly shown through the use of colour) rather than be faced with a page full of identical complicated text is crucial to making them want to go further rather than walk away having been overwhelmed by a word-heavy page. Colour is crucial on net pages because it is something that net users more than hardcopy users will presume is going to be there. Black and white, or grey, is an instant visual turnoff on colour screens for the vast majority of screens unless very very very well designed.

The warmer the colours the less the danger that someone will get intimidated away by the text within the crucial first five seconds. The old wiki front pages embodied the worst possible way to greet a potential reader: hit them with realms of text which they may not be able to make head or tail of, certainly not in the first five seconds when they will decide whether to stay or go. A clear graphic style, a page that is not too text heavily, and the use of colour to 'break up' the page into less intimidating portions, are three crucial features if a front page is to work. The changes solve two of those problems. The next crucial reform is to axe most of the text, so that what is on the page is easy to read, large enough to be reader-friendly and does not intimidate a new arrival. The old page was a disaster in that regard and the German page not much better. If I had used such a page in any advertorial, the person who commissioned me to produce the document would have refused to pay me, becuase the document would have been dead in the water, a guaranteed turn off with the vast majority of people who glanced at it, it ending up unread in the bin. FearÉIREANN 22:01 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't know what an advertorial is, but it doesn't sound very comparable to an encylopaedia. Anyway, I doubt many people would disagree that the main page shouldn't look like an "amateur cut and paste pre-DTP document", but the problem is that people don't agree on what makes it look like that. You might find colours look professional, but not everybody does (and anyway, not everybody particularly wants to look "professional" - after all, we're not). Certainly, whatever camp one falls into, it's possible to find many websites to support one's view that way X is the sole True and Right way.

Personally, I've come round to thinking that reducing clutter is more important than the question of colour. I don't find Main Page/Temp3 nearly as bad as the current main page, and though I'd prefer it to be without colour as well, I could live with it if it meant having a simpler front page (I'd also prefer to do away with the vertical division, but I don't think anybody else dislikes that quite as much as I do). --Camembert

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Personally I think that at the top of the main page there should have some big bold graphics, which proclaim "Wikipedia Your Free Encyclopedia" or some such.

It looks a bit dry and amateurish at the moment G-Man 14:46 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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Oh great, another stupid vote. Voting on this seems rather premature - shouldn't the people who object to the color try to help us design something that most of us like and the rest of us can at least live with? This rush to voting on every stupid little thing sickens me - have we forgotten how to do things the WikiWay and compromise? Voting, especially idiotic ones like this one where the degree of approval or disapproval for each option is not counted, just polarizes people into different opposition groups. Then one option wins all and the rest (usually the majority of people who voted) don't get their ideas enacted at all. They just get shafted. If I were "voting" I would choose the three color (hues: red, yellow and blue) as my first choice, the "blue" heading fill option as my second choice and the longstanding no-color option as the third. But what I really want is for people to stop being so unimaginative and lazy that the only solution they seek is to put every damn controversial thing to a vote. See also VotingIsEvil (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?VotingIsEvil). --mav 20:24 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

And, of course, MeatBall:VotingIsGood ;-). Voting is good and useful when done right, but bad when implemented in haste and without clear rules. What we need is a formalized process for deciding when to hold a vote, e.g. after a minimum of 14 days of consensus-seeking. --Eloquence 20:39 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think the opinion poll at the top of the page is a useful one to provide a bit of feedback to the folks who designed the new page - both positive and negative. Based in part on that feedback, I hope the next design will be even better. :) Martin 21:06 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Indeed - the thing at the top of this page isn't a vote, as far as I can tell (not in the sense that some decision will be taken based solely on it, anyway). It's just there to give a rough idea of how many people think what. It seems quite useful to me, so long as we don't take it too seriously. --Camembert

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