Hi Hynek,
thanks for taking the effort to think about how to improve the site,
I welcome this very much. I certainly agree that the home page can
come over as overwhelming.
* first paragraph
This is a summary of RIFE that I've been using for a long time.
Please tell me what you find difficult to understand. It tries to
capture the essence of the ideology behind the framework. If there's
a problem with this paragraph, it really needs to be fixed. It would
be interesting to see how users like you would write this paragraph
since it's pretty difficult to target novices from my point of view.
* the content on the home page
Maybe it's good to illustrate the reasons why all this content is on
there. People that don't know RIFE come from different backgrounds
and generally don't know what the framework offers. They either often
heard about it regarding continuations, people calling it a 'Java
Rails alternative', or the constraints system. Most of them have no
clue that it's a full stack framework, nor what that means. They have
even less an idea of what's inside the full stack, ie. what
functionalities the framework offers them. Last, there have been a
huge amount of people that just didn't look closer into RIFE since
they made the wrong assumptions about the capabilities of the web
engine.
* the differentiators
I personally think this is a very important list since it allows
people to get a quick summary of what sets RIFE apart. We have had a
lot of questions about this in the past.
What do other users think? How could we better restructure the home
page?
Maybe some big buttons like the DWR (http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/) or
Rails home page (http://rubyonrails.com/) would be better?
How would you structure this and which main points would you highlight?
Note that the rifers.org website itself is open-source (https://
svn.rifers.org/rifers/trunk/), so anyone who feels like it can just
go ahead and propose a new arrangement for the home page. I'm picking
up RIFE development back up full time now, but will focus on the next
release and the external continuations library. It would be great if
the Rifers community could improve the site itself and take a big
load of my shoulders.
Take care,
Geert
On 30 Nov 2006, at 17:55, Hynek Schlawack wrote:
Hi,
after a few months I have to get again into RIFE and while studying
the
homepage I noticed that RIFE's front page is pretty overloaded and
IMHO
unfriendly.
It's simply too much text that overwhelms the reader. Even I, who
grokked RIFE at least a bit have problems to understand the first
paragraph. Then there are simply too many bullets. To see the
graphic I
have to scroll even on my pretty high resolution. Finally "Why RIFE's
web engine?" belongs IMHO on an own sub-page on it's own.
My suggestion would be: A shorter, friendlier first paragraph which
shall spark interest on RIFE. Then only a few bullets with the most
important features of RIFE and a "More" link which might contain them
all (for my sake just hidden using JavaScript). Anyway, they are
inside
"Features" in any case, so it might be not necessary at all.
Then there should be an "Overview" page which might contain the
graphic
of the stack and most of the text which is on the front page now.
I think it's no use to write (nearly) all features on the homepage
when
only few people are going to read it completely anyway. I'd vote for a
bigger font and catchier phrases which would be backed by other
pages. I'd not go as far as the RoR guys went, but the direction would
be fine.
Just my 2ยข.
-hs
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Geert Bevin
Uwyn "Use what you need" - http://uwyn.com
RIFE Java application framework - http://rifers.org
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