On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:04:04 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic
wrote:
So, what do you guys think?
-- Aleksandar
I do agree that the design of the current site is rather dated. I
rather like your new proposed design as well. One thing that
could be nicer is the search bar being a button to click. It's
standard now to just make it an input of type search with
place-holder text now, which is faster and more useable. Even
better, it could be automatically focused on when you load the
(documentation) page so you can immediately start typing to look
up an API / language feature.
People who go directly to the homepage are likely coming to check
out what D is or why they should use it (which the homepage
shows), find a download button (which could still be improved
upon), or search the documentation (which is still a few clicks
away). I'd argue that most people are going for the third option
since you don't need to download often and people just checking
it out don't return frequently to check it out again. Having an
immediate search field, ideally with autofocus, makes finding
documentation a very easy task.
A prominent download button immediately visible on the home page
rather than the top nav-bar would be an improvement as well.
Practically every site with something to download does this, for
good reason. It's one of the first things that should jump out at
you when you view the site, making it as little effort as
possible to commit to at least downloading the installer (see
Dart, Python, Rust, Go, Ruby, etc). The longer / more effort it
takes to do something, the less likely people are to try it
unless they're already very convinced it's something they need.
