Let's make the DLang Tour an awesome landing page for D newbies

[Carl Vogel via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 19:24:49 UTC, Seb wrote:
> Let me start with the good news: since the DLang Tour was 
> launched by André last month, we had about 3K unique visitors 
> and continuously have between 100-200 visitors per day.
>
> However here are the bad news: We loose about 40% of all 
> visitors directly on the front page and we loose the majority 
> (>70%) on the first ten pages.
> Our DLang Tour is the starting point for newcomers. Hence if 
> you think in terms of Andrei's first five minutes, we loose 
> pretty badly!
>
> We already tried to improve things a bit (slicker design, D-man 
> on the front page), but we need your help to motivate future 
> D-eists and inspire them!
>
> Last week we split the tour in individual Markdown files per 
> chapter, s.t. improving the tour is only a button click away.

I don't think you're going to solve this problem with better 
content for the tour--since people aren't even really getting to 
the content. Also, losing people after 10 pages doesn't sound 
that bad. I wouldn't expect people to go through the whole tour 
in one sitting.  Nonetheless there are a couple of things that 
make me bounce.

The main one is no visible TOC. The only way to move around the 
tour is to go forward or backward one by one---making it hard to 
skip around, or understand what topics are coming up. A div on 
the side with all the section links would be great.

Also, while the live code window in the browser is neat, it 
breaks up the flow of the page, and I feel like I'd usually just 
prefer inline un-editable text. (E.g., what are you really going 
to experiment with in the Hello World script here? 
http://tour.dlang.org/tour/en/basics/imports-and-modules)

These are just my opinions, and I don't claim to be 
representative of the audience you want to attract.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic project. Thanks to all 
who've been working on it!