On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 07:07:23 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
Home page:
This is a mess. There is way too much here. There is an
attention budget and it is important to manage it well.
I think you're overstating it: it's a bit busy, but I think it
can be fixed.
The usual for a programming language goes as follow :
- Logo, color as per branding.
Yeah, we should probably incorporate the red more.
- Language name, quick blurb about what it is, usually ending
with a link to tutorial.
We have the language name twice! Do we need a longer blurb?
None of your examples seem to link to an official tutorial at
all, so we're ahead of the game there. (Sort of. It's on a
different domain and doesn't match "D style".)
- Big fat download button.
It's right in the middle of the page. Should we wrap it in
<blink> to make it more obvious? (Seriously: I agree it should be
bigger. Changelog link smaller and underneath instead.)
- Some sample code. The one we have on the front page is way
too big. It should be a piece of code that someone with 0
experience in the language can understand.
The RPN example is too big. The sort lines example is nice. Is
there some sort of rotation here? Go kinda gets it right with
the dropdown. Scala's tiles are poorly telegraphed.
- A menu with quick access to what more experienced users want
: stdlib reference, code repository, wiki, forum, language
spec, news, this kind of thing.
So, the stuff on the sidebar?
Some examples:
http://www.scala-lang.org/
Well, I guess it's pretty? Examples aren't obvious and the
documentation uses a completely different colour scheme for
Reasons(?).
https://nodejs.org/en/
Thoroughly useless bootstrap placeholder.
https://developer.apple.com/swift/
What on earth? There's no download at all, no obvious doc link,
way too much verticality, and they've overdone it on the
whitespace. I guess they only care about people with high-dollar
Apple screens.
https://golang.org/
Ugly but functional. Decent layout, though I still don't get
this fetish for top links.
https://www.rust-lang.org/
Slightly better than Go. Could we stop pretending 1024x768 is
The Best Resolution?
Last but not least, it wouldn't hurt to hire a designer to have
something slick.
I think the biggest issues are the sidebar cleanliness and the
main content having a single-column design. I like the _idea_ of
having the discussion boxouts in the right column, but it comes
at the expense of the rest of the content and contributes to the
fatigue.
-Wyatt
