On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 07:42:05 UTC, DaveG wrote:
On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 04:44:56 UTC, Israel wrote:
On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 02:18:16 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
I took the better part of today working on this:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/780.
See demo at http://erdani.com/d/.
What do you all think? Is it an improvement over what we have
now?
I'd appreciate your help with reviewing and pulling this, and
also with improving the colors (which I'm terrible at) and
page tracking as mentioned in the pull request.
I'm no designer, but I do have some comments. Without
consistency it just looks a bunch of parts rather than a
singular thing. Some elements have gradients, some don't. Some
elements have round corners, some don't. Elements with borders
use different widths, some have none. In regards to borders, we
engineering types (maybe it's just me) tend to put boxes around
stuff to represent discrete units when basic design concepts,
like proximity and contrast, may be better suited for the task.
I just took a quick pass at it in the browser:
Original:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/current.png
Cleanup:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/001.png
Cleanup w/o bg:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/002.png
Think "consistency and subtlety". Good design generally goes
unnoticed.
Too much code, I know its what you want people to see but if
the entire length of the website consists of giant blocks of
code it just doesnt look as pleasing to the eyes...
put all of that code and introduction to D into a subpage
called "About"/"Intro to D". have it be the first subpage on
the left column.
The front page should be updated with new content like your
tweets, forum posts, articles from other websites,reddit, etc.
maybe under the documentation put a "Getting started" Tutorial?
I agree, from a new user perspective all the code might seem
like a bit much. It might be a good to have short blurb about
"Why D?" or "What is D?" or something. I also like the idea of
highlighting some key projects, particularly ones with broad
appeal (dub and VisualD come to mind). I would recommend
keeping things like blog posts, tweets, etc. out of the the
main content (on the side or bottom is fine). External sources
usually make no sense to a new user, or are generic press
pieces which are unnecessary because the person is already on
the site.
-Dave
This is very true. As a newcomer you've probably already found
out about D through another website, friend, etc. Which proves
your point 'unnecessary because the person is already on the
site.'. however I'm thinking about people like is who are already
here. We need to see how D is impacting the rest of the world so
turning the front page to something like a blog would make
traffic flow like crazy and grab more attention. Which is what D
needs the most right now.
If you just have a static page frozen the same way for 7 years.
You kind of start to see why people think "D is dead".