Please help me with improving dlang.org

[DaveG via Digitalmars-d]

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