dlang.org redesign n+1

[aldanor via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 15:35:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 January 2015 at 14:46:22 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe 
> wrote:
>> Just for fun and proof-of-concept I went ahead and forked the 
>> dlang.org site. I basically took the 
>> `do-what-everybody-else-is-doing` approach:
>>
>> http://dlang.skoppe.eu
>>
>> It is still a wip, but the landing page and the language 
>> reference (see Docs menu-item) is working.
>>
>> Doing the ddoc was a maze of macro's at first. But spending a 
>> couple of hours untangling the mess, I finally found the ones 
>> I needed to change. After that things went pretty smooth. So 
>> ddoc ain't that bad. It is just that I didn't have syntax 
>> highlighting - nor goto-definition - and I hate that.
>>
>> Still, it is cool in a way that I can just change some 
>> macro's, tweak the index.dd, the doc.ddoc and don't have to 
>> worry about all the other pages.
>>
>> BTW, the build process on windows was way easier than linux. 
>> In fact, I could not get the makefile to run on linux at all. 
>> Looking into posix.mak, I see a blur of path's, all 
>> misconfigured, and I bet I am supposed to set those manually. 
>> I don't get it, doesn't everything has its own place? Isn't 
>> dmd always installed in /usr/bin, /usr/include/dmd and that 
>> stuff? I suppose not everyone is using the same distro. Or 
>> they are, except me :)
>
> Good start. A few points:
>
> 1. The font is too big (see also 2.).
> 2. A lot of space is wasted. To fix this, maybe it would help 
> to lay it out in "tiles" (two or three items in one row, cf 
> http://foundation.zurb.com/).
> As it is now, the three major points Convenience, Power and 
> Efficiency are too far apart, there's too much scrolling 
> involved (which users hate). All the important information 
> should be visible at once.
> 3. No need to use so much space for "The D Programming 
> Language", especially since we don't have a fancy graphic to 
> fill that space (why should we).
> 4. Tools like DUB etc. should be bundled as on the Foundation 
> homepage under something like "Build products, apps and 
> services"

Good work in the right direction!.. and now for some bikeshedding:

Agreed with Chris on (1), (2), (3), plus:
(4) Not mobile-ready / not responsive. Try resizing horizontally 
and see what happens. This is related to (2) and could be solved 
by using a proper grid framework.
(5) Use a better sans serif font (with a fallback to browser 
default sans family), it actually matters a lot :) Like Fira 
Sans, Helvetica Neue or something like that. Could use a better 
monospaced font as well
(6) Hover-on/-off effects (like in the menu above) are usually 
frowned upon since they won't work on mobile devices as you 
expect. It's sometimes better to just have plain properly styled 
links.
(7) The search bar seems misplaced