Redesign of dlang.org

[David Gileadi via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/18/14, 7:22 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:04:03 -0400, Aleksandar Ruzicic
> <aleksandar at ruzicic.info> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been D enthusiast for couple of years now (but I do not
>> participate much in discussions here, although I read forums almost
>> daily), and I keep telling people about D and how awesome it is.
>
> Great!
>
>> But, all this time D's official website somehow archaic look kept
>> troubling me. It reminds me of early 2000's design and I really cannot
>> associate this design with "modern" or "elegant", what D really is.
>> I think that we must invest time and energy improving the website's
>> look and feel as that is what people first coming to D will see. We
>> need to strive for "wow" and not "meh" as a first impression.
>>
>> So I have started this thread to see if there is a chance for complete
>> redesign of dlang.org.
>>
>> I have also tried to design something myself (although I'm not a
>> designer) and this is what I came up with:
>>
>> http://krcko.net/dlang.org/dlang-home-draft1.png
>>
>> I'm not entirely satisfied with it but I believe that it looks better
>> (or at least more modern) than the current design.
>>
>>
>> So, what do you guys think?
>
> To be honest, it looks no "better" than the current website. Basically
> it's more windows-8-ish. But I don't think it's a significant
> improvement. BTW, I don't think you properly remember early 2000's web
> sites...
>
> I don't share your opinion that the web site need to be "modern" to
> avoid warding off potential adopters. If they are turned off of using a
> system programming language by a bland (debatable) site look and feel,
> then I think there was really something else bothering them.
>
> That being said, changing look and feel has a "this site is being
> maintained" air to it. I just don't think it's critical enough at this
> point to diverge talent away from working on the language.
>
> -Steve

As the guy who was mostly responsible for the current look and feel of 
the website I can provide some insight into the effort required. The 
website is built using DDoc[1], and anyone who wants to change the look 
and feel will need to learn it. It's not difficult. It does mean that 
the site is static HTML, so any dynamism needs to be JS-only (and I 
think any efforts to make the pages largely JS-driven would meet 
resistance).

What was a little weird was trying to use DDoc to expand" the navigation 
tree when you're on a subpage of a main category. The original website 
listed every single page in the sidebar, which made the sidebar 
extremely unwieldy. Due to DDoc limitations I ended up having to put a 
CATEGORY_FOO macro in each page in the site, where the FOO is one of the 
categories in the sidebar. You may be able to figure out a better way. 
Just fork the site on github[2] and experiment!

Also note that there's a movement to make at least part of the website 
(the Phobos docs) use a different documentation generator, so the new 
look would need to be ported to that too. I suspect that wouldn't be hard.

Be aware that the current Tweets sidebar on the main page may be hard to 
get rid of; I noticed it wasn't in your mockup :)

Based on the last go-around there would be some work required from 
Walter and Andrei, but assuming you're implementing the new look and 
feel then their work would be mostly related to pushing changes to a 
beta site and then to the main site. They can probably speak better to 
the amount of effort they'd need to put in. If you're not doing the work 
of implementing the new look and feel then I suspect this proposal is 
dead on arrival unless someone else steps up to help.

Finally I like your look; I think it would be worth refining and 
pursuing. I make no claim to be a graphic designer and I'm certainly not 
offended by any criticism of the current look; at the time I had two 
goals; 1) look better than the previous site at digitalmars.com and 2) 
tame the massive sidebar into something more reasonable. I think they 
both succeeded but I'm very aware that things can look better.

[1] http://dlang.org/ddoc.html
[2] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org