Redesign

[michaeldeborst]

I didn't really know how else to get in touch so I'm just doing it like this. I have some time on my hands and I like the project a lot. Since I'm a webdesigner by trade I thought I could help you guys out by redesigning the webpage (and maybe some of the branding if you want). Let me know what you think @kingosticks

[kingosticks]

I am interested in this and I would appreciate help here as it's not something I have much luck with.

All of the following is open for discussion but here's what I currently think:

• The current www.pimusicbox.com landing page has too much information on it. I'd like to move to something far simpler and clearer. Just stating what it is and the main features, maybe some graphics showing example setups (speakers, headphones, dlna, airplay). I think https://etcher.io/ is a good example of something like this.
• All of the technical content / instructions can then live solely in the manual web pages which the landing page can link to (like https://docs.mopidy.com). Maintaining two copies is pointless. This manual is generated from https://github.com/pimusicbox/pimusicbox/tree/develop/docs. We can also include a copy of these manual web pages in the release and link to them from websettings / webclient / admin page. There is a certain amount of sphinx theming possible to make these pages fit in with a design but I'm not sure how far you can go with it.
• A new logo! The Raspberry Pi Foundation asked us to remove our old logo and the replacement isn't brilliant.
• The state of our brand: 'Pi Musicbox' vs 'Musicbox' is something which could be better defined. The idea was always going to be that our eventual Debian packages should be split out into generic and Pi-specific packages, so a non-Pi version of Musicbox would be possible. For that reason, maybe our logo/brand doesn't want to be 100% tied to the Raspberry Pi? Something to keep in mind.

And outside of www.pimusicbox.com directly, but other related design issues:

• Pi Musicbox itself could do with an admin/central web page with links for settings, displaying logs, upgrading etc, now playing info for non-mopidy sources (airplay, spotify connect etc). This would also provide the setup wizard shown when people first boot their system. This is something separate that isn't built into musicbox_webclient since not everyone wants to use that and it'll also be (hopefully) running even when Mopidy itself has crashed/failed.
• The websettings page needs design love, maybe folded into the above.

I hope I have not scared you off with all this. There's a lot of scope for people's own ideas here, this is just a brain dump.

[michaeldeborst]

@kingosticks I appreciate the ideas and IMHO brain dumps are usually very helpful :). I think I'll start on some preliminary website designs and maybe some logo things, but I have a friend who is a great graphic designer who I can get to help out on the branding front. I agree to make the whole experience more streamlined in the ways you mentioned ( setup wizard, auto update) but I'll leave that to the great folks in the main pimusicbox repo to consider (I could submit some designs though If I have time left).

Again this enthousiasm is really invigorating and I would love to do a service to a project which I like this much!

EDIT: Some naming suggestions would be welcome ( If you were looking for a potential rename)

[michaeldeborst]

@kingosticks Is it an idea to start a project in this GitHub repo (at least for me to keep track of stuff?) Otherwise do a trello board or something similar. I would like to hit off some branding ideas and that would be a better way to format it.

[michaeldeborst]

I added a pull request from my own fork. I would suggest you make a branch to put this in if you want to merge.