Please help me with improving dlang.org

[Israel via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 07:42:05 UTC, DaveG wrote:
> 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

This is very true. As a newcomer you've probably already found 
out about D through another website, friend, etc. Which proves 
your point 'unnecessary because the person is already on the 
site.'. however I'm thinking about people like is who are already 
here. We need to see how D is impacting the rest of the world so 
turning the front page to something like a blog would make 
traffic flow like crazy and grab more attention. Which is what D 
needs the most right now.

If you just have a static page frozen the same way for 7 years. 
You kind of start to see why people think "D is dead".