Redesign of dlang.org

[Kapps via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:04:04 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic 
wrote:
> So, what do you guys think?
> -- Aleksandar

I do agree that the design of the current site is rather dated. I 
rather like your new proposed design as well. One thing that 
could be nicer is the search bar being a button to click. It's 
standard now to just make it an input of type search with 
place-holder text now, which is faster and more useable. Even 
better, it could be automatically focused on when you load the 
(documentation) page so you can immediately start typing to look 
up an API / language feature.

People who go directly to the homepage are likely coming to check 
out what D is or why they should use it (which the homepage 
shows), find a download button (which could still be improved 
upon), or search the documentation (which is still a few clicks 
away). I'd argue that most people are going for the third option 
since you don't need to download often and people just checking 
it out don't return frequently to check it out again. Having an 
immediate search field, ideally with autofocus, makes finding 
documentation a very easy task.

A prominent download button immediately visible on the home page 
rather than the top nav-bar would be an improvement as well. 
Practically every site with something to download does this, for 
good reason. It's one of the first things that should jump out at 
you when you view the site, making it as little effort as 
possible to commit to at least downloading the installer (see 
Dart, Python, Rust, Go, Ruby, etc). The longer / more effort it 
takes to do something, the less likely people are to try it 
unless they're already very convinced it's something they need.