On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 00:08:06 UTC, Kapps wrote:
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.
It sure looks like a button and it wouldn't be a button. It would
be a regular text (search) input field (something that would be
apparent as soon as you hover it and get that I-beam cursor over
it) that would expand on click/focus (no JS needed there, don't
worry Nick!).
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.
I'm slightly against autofocus on search field, as I am one of
people who use Backspace to navigate to previous page and I'm
always frustrated when I hit Backspace on Google search results
page and it's not taking me to previous page.
But if majority thinks that autofocus on search is a good thing
(I also think that not many people use Backspace as a means of
navigation) than I would make it like that (and if there would be
that little preferences page/popup this option is something that
can go there together with justification settings).
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.
Download sites do that, so does sites that sell software. I think
that dlang.org should focus on promoting D as a language, and
compiler implementations should not be in spotlight.
Also I think that having Download in top-nav as a first option is
prominent enough. I've put what I think are the most important
sections in top-nav bar (other navigation items should go to
context-sensitive sidebar).
