On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 04:56:46 UTC, Val Markovic wrote:
So, Andrei also mentioned how the community needs to improve the
dlang.orgsite and make it a first-class priority. It's the
point of
contact for
newcomers so it's very important we get it right. Since I know a
thing-or-two about web development, I decided to look into
improving the
site.
Let me put my two cents at this thread, hope it would be useful.
(1) The thread went (from the start) to discussion of technical
details, not content discussion, and users are interested in
content itself, which, IMHO is not optimally organized.
(2) Flashing and slow responses are annoying but not so crucial
(as from my experience), thought somebody waits for up to 7
seconds to load web page - agree, that should be fixed, but
again, i do not have such problem or didn't noticed (why?).
(3) dlang.org content organisation:
(3.1) start page describes the language - very good, but it
would be better if it also contains clear links (the big big
buttons) to overview, download page, tutorial, documentation;
(3.2) as were already mentioned the documentation should be
extracted to dedicated site (either subdomain or subfolder)
mainly to remove unnecessary at this section main site
navigation. technically it would be better because documentation
for sure have different markup / layout / page structure and
probably would have different presentation. As for me I loved
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/edoc.html - clear, navigable,
lightweight;
(3.3) explicit language tutorial section would be great
benefit (not doc->book->tutorial), language tour like for go
language would be excellent.
(3.4) explicit getting started page (infrastructure preparing)
(3.4) are articles part of documentation?
(4) design and appearance:
(4.1) fixed width layout - more readable, all typesetting
books recommends line to be no more then 66 characters long;
(4.2) scrolling navigation pane is annoying.
(4.3) more lightweight and readable design: lighter
background tones and darker foreground tones (people get used to
read black symbols on white paper), thiner or zero borders, more
explicit headers.
(5) external and outdated content: there are different d specific
content outside dlang.org (i.e. source.org) containing tutorials,
articles, source codes that is outdated and doesn't even compile.
this mislead newbie, gets him irritated and force to quit
learning language. if it is possible this content should be
revised and incorporated to dlang.org and removed, because it
breaks down all language marketing.
This just my thought that i hope could be useful, cause i'm a
visual person type and got easily embarrassed by a lot of content
especially when it is not well-formed =)
