David Scotson

This is from 2000, but despite being a big believer in this principle, I was unaware (until 5 minutes ago) that this already had a name, and in fact was formulated by the godfather of web usability himself:

Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

This Law is not even a future trend since it has been ruling the Web for several years. It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon. Think "shopping cart" and the silly little icon. Think blue text links.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/

Still as true today.

We should look at replacing that with:

<main id="maincontent" role="main">Actual content goes here</main>

Looks like it would be easy, just have to worry about it breaking fragile overspecified javascript.

Related to that, the front page seems to have a couple of accessibility issues since the main content area (as pointed to by two different accessibility aids, contains just a br tag:

<div role="main"><span id="maincontent"></span><br></div>

Don't know if that's fixable though if blocks are being used for the main content.

The bar is 40px and the image is sized at 20px, so to center it like the other text you'd expect 10px padding above and below.

Currently it's only got 5px padding above, which I think makes it too high up, and leaves a weird 5px gap where you can't click on the logo at the bottom.

However, because the logo is a bit bottom heavy with only the "dl" poking up a bit, I think it looks more centered if you have say 8px padding above and 12px padding below (or 9/11px).

As for the docking blocks, I know it's a popular feature (at least amongst administrators of Moodle sites), and technically impressive, but I actually think it actively harms the usability of Moodle, and doesn't really make any sense on mobile devices so would love to see it getting phased out entirely. (It's never been turned on our Moodle site for those reasons).

edit: while I'm here, it looks like you're bringing in the whole theme CSS twice, if you examine most elements in a browser you'll see the same declarations twice, with only occasional minor differences. I think I did this before and it was because I was regenerating the whole CSS for the child theme from the LESS, and forgetting to exclude the near identical CSS from the parent theme.

I've just filed MDL-43907 "Make tables of data themeable"

Quoting from that bug:

The ideal situation would be:

a small number of lines (say <5) of CSS can consistently control the look of every presentation of standard tabular data across Moodle, including those generated by 3rd party plugins, and be easily tweaked by themers for different looks without accidentally affecting complex tables (gradebook etc.), without affecting user-generated-content (which will often use tables for layout), and without affecting the tables still used for layout in Moodle itself.