Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal

[Peter Bex]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 04:24:18PM +0900, Tim van der Linden wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> The first thing I did on this journey was to take a peek at our fellow 
> language pages, and see what they do to reel them in. A quick glance at other 
> languages (like Python, Racket (!), Ruby, Erlang, ...) show the following 
> common features:
> 
> - See common, easy-to-understand code samples depicting typical language 
> features
> - Clear changelog timeline
> - Visual weight (visual importance, not one blob of text)
> - Big Download/Get Started now call-to-action

Hi, Timusan!

You can add to the list
- Ugly
- Confusing and hard to navigate

But I hope we won't copy *those* parts ;)

> Things less commonly see, but just plain beautiful:
> 
> - The ability to run code in an interactive shell

This is pretty cool, but a potential security problem.  Even if
the sandbox egg is perfect (which I'm not sure about), it can
still bog down the server if too many people use it at the same time.
I'd personally prefer a fast, static page.  Just my .02 EUR (whatever
that's worth nowadays)

> - A map of CHICKEN across the world

We used to have a map, on the old wiki.  Nobody has ever complained
about this functionality getting lost on the new wiki.  It is also a
bit of a privacy issue.  It would of course be opt-in, but I'm not sure
as a project we should be encouraging people to give away their exact
geolocation.

> - A list of real-life CHICKEN projects
> - An awesome photo of chickens

Yes!  We must have CHICKEN imagery! :)

> For the design I thought it would be smart to give it a minimalistic 
> approach...CHICKEN is a tiny language after all, and we want to tout it's 
> simplicity, right?
> 
> Before putting in to much design work, I thought I would throw it out early 
> in the process.
> So I have gone ahead and create a (very rough) design for the homepage only, 
> using flat elements and hopefully a better approach then currently is the 
> case.
> Mind that this is only a mock-up (nothing works!) and not all information is 
> accurate. But it should give you a fairly good idea of the direction I wish 
> to take...
> 
> Also...if there are any *real* designers in the house...any help is welcomed 
> ;)
> 
> Find it here: http://shisaa.jp/chicken/
> 
> All input is greatly appreciated and I hope this will spark a few ideas here 
> and there...

I really like the basic approach; it's fresh and clean.  However, you still
kept around a lot of text from the old page.  But this is something that
can be fixed once the basic layout has been set.

I think the "WHY CHICKEN" white on yellow is a little hard to read.
Black text provides for better contrast?  Also here I think the list of
bullets is a little long, and provides too much reading.  Perhaps an
alternative is to have only clickable keywords there, and provide
a more extensive explanation (with code samples?) in the panel on the
right.

Finally, I think the eggs list deserves a link in the main menu (maybe
name it something like "extensions" or "libraries" so it's clear to
people new to CHICKEN).

Other than that, great job on this initial design!  Thank you for putting
in the effort.

Cheers,
Peter

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