On 4/18/14, 7:22 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:04:03 -0400, Aleksandar Ruzicic
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,
I've been D enthusiast for couple of years now (but I do not
participate much in discussions here, although I read forums almost
daily), and I keep telling people about D and how awesome it is.
Great!
But, all this time D's official website somehow archaic look kept
troubling me. It reminds me of early 2000's design and I really cannot
associate this design with "modern" or "elegant", what D really is.
I think that we must invest time and energy improving the website's
look and feel as that is what people first coming to D will see. We
need to strive for "wow" and not "meh" as a first impression.
So I have started this thread to see if there is a chance for complete
redesign of dlang.org.
I have also tried to design something myself (although I'm not a
designer) and this is what I came up with:
http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-home-draft1.png
I'm not entirely satisfied with it but I believe that it looks better
(or at least more modern) than the current design.
So, what do you guys think?
To be honest, it looks no "better" than the current website. Basically
it's more windows-8-ish. But I don't think it's a significant
improvement. BTW, I don't think you properly remember early 2000's web
sites...
I don't share your opinion that the web site need to be "modern" to
avoid warding off potential adopters. If they are turned off of using a
system programming language by a bland (debatable) site look and feel,
then I think there was really something else bothering them.
That being said, changing look and feel has a "this site is being
maintained" air to it. I just don't think it's critical enough at this
point to diverge talent away from working on the language.
-Steve
As the guy who was mostly responsible for the current look and feel of
the website I can provide some insight into the effort required. The
website is built using DDoc[1], and anyone who wants to change the look
and feel will need to learn it. It's not difficult. It does mean that
the site is static HTML, so any dynamism needs to be JS-only (and I
think any efforts to make the pages largely JS-driven would meet
resistance).
What was a little weird was trying to use DDoc to expand" the navigation
tree when you're on a subpage of a main category. The original website
listed every single page in the sidebar, which made the sidebar
extremely unwieldy. Due to DDoc limitations I ended up having to put a
CATEGORY_FOO macro in each page in the site, where the FOO is one of the
categories in the sidebar. You may be able to figure out a better way.
Just fork the site on github[2] and experiment!
Also note that there's a movement to make at least part of the website
(the Phobos docs) use a different documentation generator, so the new
look would need to be ported to that too. I suspect that wouldn't be hard.
Be aware that the current Tweets sidebar on the main page may be hard to
get rid of; I noticed it wasn't in your mockup :)
Based on the last go-around there would be some work required from
Walter and Andrei, but assuming you're implementing the new look and
feel then their work would be mostly related to pushing changes to a
beta site and then to the main site. They can probably speak better to
the amount of effort they'd need to put in. If you're not doing the work
of implementing the new look and feel then I suspect this proposal is
dead on arrival unless someone else steps up to help.
Finally I like your look; I think it would be worth refining and
pursuing. I make no claim to be a graphic designer and I'm certainly not
offended by any criticism of the current look; at the time I had two
goals; 1) look better than the previous site at digitalmars.com and 2)
tame the massive sidebar into something more reasonable. I think they
both succeeded but I'm very aware that things can look better.
[1] http://dlang.org/ddoc.html
[2] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org
