working on the dlang.org website

[Ruslan Mullakhmetov]

On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 04:56:46 UTC, Val Markovic wrote:

> So, Andrei also mentioned how the community needs to improve the
> dlang.orgsite and make it a first-class priority. It's the 
> point of
> contact for
> newcomers so it's very important we get it right. Since I know a
> thing-or-two about web development, I decided to look into 
> improving the
> site.


Let me put my two cents at this thread, hope it would be useful.

(1) The thread went (from the start) to discussion of technical 
details, not content discussion, and users are interested in 
content itself, which, IMHO is not optimally organized.

(2) Flashing and slow responses are annoying but not so crucial 
(as from my experience), thought somebody waits for up to 7 
seconds to load web page - agree, that should be fixed, but 
again, i do not have such problem or didn't noticed (why?).

(3) dlang.org content organisation:
     (3.1) start page describes the language - very good, but it 
would be better if it also contains clear links (the big big 
buttons) to overview, download page, tutorial, documentation;
     (3.2) as were already mentioned the documentation should be 
extracted to dedicated site (either subdomain or subfolder) 
mainly to remove unnecessary at this section main site 
navigation. technically it would be better because documentation 
for sure have different markup / layout / page structure and 
probably would have different presentation. As for me I loved 
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/edoc.html - clear, navigable, 
lightweight;
     (3.3) explicit language tutorial section would be great 
benefit (not doc->book->tutorial), language tour like for go 
language would be excellent.
     (3.4) explicit getting started page (infrastructure preparing)
     (3.4) are articles part of documentation?

(4) design and appearance:
     (4.1) fixed width layout - more readable, all typesetting 
books recommends line to be no more then 66 characters long;
     (4.2) scrolling navigation pane is annoying.
     (4.3) more lightweight and readable design: lighter 
background tones and darker foreground tones (people get used to 
read black symbols on white paper), thiner or zero borders, more 
explicit headers.

(5) external and outdated content: there are different d specific 
content outside dlang.org (i.e. source.org) containing tutorials, 
articles, source codes that is outdated and doesn't even compile. 
this mislead newbie, gets him irritated and force to quit 
learning language. if it is possible this content should be 
revised and incorporated to dlang.org and removed, because it 
breaks down all language marketing.

This just my thought that i hope could be useful, cause i'm a 
visual person type and got easily embarrassed by a lot of content 
especially when it is not well-formed =)