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Portal:Energy

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The energy portal has been in operation now for about 9 month and, thanks to a peer review 3 months ago and a recent push to add to the content & introduce randomization, I believe that it now meets the featured portal criteria. Gralo 03:05, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

White space within sections is part of the page design and, although opinions will no doubt differ, IMHO it's not wasted. The space between sections varies most due to the particular selected photograph displayed as some are portrait and others landscape - although several have been cropped to reduce this effect. The effect also varies according to screen resolution.
Scroll length is similar to many other featured portals - for example Architecture, Portugal, Cuba, Photography, Vancouver, India, Poetry... :Gralo 20:56, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Have just taken some white out of the section footers, however, where it really wasn't helping. Gralo 22:35, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Still would like to see the meta sections removed to a new tab page. The tab setup is already there, so it would be easy to give the main tab a cleaner appearance.--cj | talk 15:30, 24 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I agree this portal's main page is a bit long. Each section has a few more bullets or paragraphs than is typical. It has a separate header box and toc (if the page isn't "long," why have it?). It also has a "Help" box, the only point of it seeming to be to act as a column spacer. Since the portal already uses tabs (which are asymmetrical), I also agree its appearance would be improved by moving some content to a third tab, eliminating the toc and Help boxes, and balancing out the main page. RichardF 18:16, 4 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comments. To cover a couple of the points raised, the TOC was added after I found it a useful navigation aid on the medicine portal. The Help box was added for the benefit of users less familiar with Wikipedia who may not know of the reference desk service and the excellent additional help that they can provide; depending on the particular combination of random and other content, in some cases it fills the right hand column column to match the left, in other cases the colum is either shorter or longer. Gralo 00:39, 11 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Support. Exhaustive indeed especially the "Explore topics & categories" subpage which, in my opinion, is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with a portal being loaded with information as long as it's interesting and useful to the target audience (and attractive enough to entice them to read). The contents are great and this is overall a great portal and deserves to be featured. However, I do have some small suggestions for improvement, mainly about the design issues. When they are addressed I'll change my vote from "weak support" to "support". Here they are:
  • The Portal:Energy/Title is taking too much of space and seems a bit out of theme design-wise. It really doesn't go with the rest of the page and by itself doesn't have much function. Maybe consider reducing the size and change the design to be a bit more coherent with other sections. Or just merge it and the link to the topic subpage into the "Introduction" section, That way you'll save a lot of space as this portal is quite long.
  • Background color will help a lot. The white background makes the portal seem even longer and exhasting to read. Some non-white color as section background (or as main page background while keeping the section background white) would distinguish the sections and make the overall look a bit more exciting.
  • For the news section, may be adding links to outside sources? This is certainly not required, as many other portals don't have it, but it'd be a nice addition as it would increase credibility as well as help readers who want to read more. See example at Portal:India.

Hope my suggestions help. This is a great portal and I think your work is appreciated. Good luck! --Melanochromis 06:12, 11 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thanks for taking the time to contribute, and for your appreciation.
  • Deciding to deviate from the box portal template in the ways chosen was intended to create a distinctive identity, but did involve some decisions that others have not had to tackle. I've tried playing with the title size and the current version seemed reasonably balanced in a range of screen resolutions (I think that the Paris portal probably has the largest title block). I would agree that if it were to be merged with the intro it could be smaller, but since tabbed pages are being used, that could mean that the two pages would look unbalanced, or that the intro was repeated on each. The tabs could be changed to help minimize that, but then the distinctiveness would be lessened a little more too...
  • In the early months the portal did have a colored background, but to me it looked much crisper and less distracting once it was changed to white - though clearly it's a matter of opinion. I have to say that I do like portals that pick up on colors clearly associated with their theme (Basque Portal and the Hinduism Portal are great examples) but, since that doesn't apply to energy, my preference is for simplicity - as opposed to the Italians, who seem to have gone to the opposite extreme (see here)!
  • The 'guidelines' for adding news suggest adding an external link if the news item is not cited in the associated article (or if there is no article to link to), but the practice between portals is, as you say, mixed. I've also wondered if citation links should be added to quotations too, since they are usually not mentioned and cited in articles; so far there is a field to enter the citation, but it's not displayed.
Gralo 23:44, 19 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Further to the above, I have now increased the saturation of the blue color used for the frames & title boxes. On balance I think it's an improvement, though it will take a few days to acclimatize to it... Gralo 01:37, 20 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support but a couple of small changes I'd like to see. I love the "change selections" button, but I think the wording does not do it justice - it is not clear what is does until you click on it. It would be good if it was rephrased to something like "Refresh Selected Article/Picture" or something along these lines. Secondly, I think a bit more depth of colour would be nice, particularly as an overall background or as a background for the individual boxes. The plain white is, well, plain! Other than that, it is very good and very thorough and uses some very innovative methods of presentation which I am definitely a champion of. Good work. DJR (T) 22:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Good point about the button wording, especially as there are now 5 sections that refresh; have changed to 'Refresh page contents'. Views on background color do seem to vary between people... the portal did once have a background color but to me it seemed cleaner without - though I do like the multiple colors used on some other portals. And thanks for the encouragement. Gralo 18:13, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, I really like the clean look of the main portal page. The /Explore page is a bit overloaded though, and I'm not a huge fan of the non-balanced multicolumn design there. Perhaps you can consider using a third tab for some of the information in the future (you know, the Featured star is no reason to stop improving the portal). Kusma (talk) 05:38, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure that the portal will continue to develop over time. One suggestion on the talk page, if it can be implemented successfully, is to add a list of new energy-related articles, for example. And perhaps a listing of 'featured' content (once there is some). With developments such as these there will certainly be scope to add a further tab in the future. It's also already been suggested that the 'Things you can do' section could move to a third tab. Once some further sections have been developed the way in which an extra tab can best be used may become clearer. Gralo 18:13, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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