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.

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?




-- Aleksandar

On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:04:03 -0400, Aleksandar Ruzicic <aleksandar@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

On 4/18/14, 7:22 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Apr 2014 10:04:03 -0400, Aleksandar Ruzicic
> <aleksandar@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

"Aleksandar Ruzicic" <aleksandar@ruzicic.info> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:mmoxalewsvwcgeaasvri@forum.dlang.org...

> But, all this time D's official website somehow archaic look kept troubling me.

Me too.

> 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?

A good start!
+1 

On 4/18/14, 8:30 AM, David Gileadi wrote:
> 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).

We can (and probably should) integrate server-side scripting as well. http://dlang.org/bugstats uses PHP. Ideally we'd migrate the entire website to vibe.d.

Andrei

On 2014-04-18 09:04, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
>
> So, what do you guys think?

i like it.

On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:04:04 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic 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.
>
> 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?
>
>
>
>
> -- Aleksandar

I like it too. A little cleaner/sharper. A little more balanced. (centered, colors, etc)

Not a huge improvement in some ways, which is good and bad. The question is, would the change be worth it? If it's easy to do, yes, if it causes problems and takes too much time to get things right, no.

> 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.

I agree that it's not a significant improvement. As I've said I'm not a designer,
this was just a try to get something more appealing than the current design.
But I work every day with excellent designers and I was thinking of contacting some
of them to iron out design, if I get approval from the community for such endeavor.

BTW there is a reason why modern operating systems (Windows 8, iOS 7) are going for flat
design. It's much easier to see content when there are no distractions like radial gradients
in background, inner/outer shadows and other things that help create 3D effect for various page components.

That being said, I do not think that current dlang.org design is not easy to read. It is, but I would still
like to see typography improvements to make it even better.


> BTW, I don't think you properly remember early 2000's web sites...

Ok, maybe not early-early 2000's but I've begun fiddling with frontend (HTML/CSS/JS)
in 2005 and the then-modern website look meant gradients, drop shadows and big glossy logos.
I've built few such websites so I think I know a thing or two about that era. :)


> 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.

Understood. But I believe that better design could improve presentation of D features.

Design should be a means to make content stand out and easy to grasp, and not to stand
in a way ("content is the king" as some would say).

And I think that current design stands in a way, especially on the Phobos pages.
Even with the recent improvements by Andrei and others it still is hard to read and navigate.
I think that we can do it better, but only if we would start with a complete redesign, not just
by tweaking the look of documentation pages.


> 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
>

The reason I've started this thread is because I'm willing to start working on this.
I would definitely need some guidance from the community but I don't think that it will
result in divergence of talent.



-- Aleksandar

On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 14:04:04 UTC, Aleksandar Ruzicic wrote:
>
> So, what do you guys think?
>
I _strongly_ suggest any proposed redesign retain the left-justification seen in the current design.  It improves readability and gives opportunities for better information density.

I know centred, fixed-width designs are in vogue, but for a documentation project, I would that the gutters instead be turned to more useful purposes.  Like documentation.

-Wyatt

On Friday, 18 April 2014 at 15:30:52 UTC, David Gileadi wrote:
>
> 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).

I know about DDoc usage, I already know it and using it, so that wouldn't be the issue.
Regarding the dynamism, I would definitely go with some JavaScript for
the search feature (I want to provide real-time filtering/suggestions something like DevDocs[1]) but I would make it optional (so that search is still usable with JS disabled/unavailable).


> 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!

Ahh I remember that lengthy sidebar, kudos for fixing it!

> 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.

I wasn't aware of that, do you by any chance have links to those threads?

> 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 :)

Yeah, I've forgot about that (I'm using extensions to disable ads and those "social" boxes so I forgot that thing exists).

> 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.

Yep, I'm planning of implementing new look and feel myself.
Of course any help would be very appreciated!


> 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.

Thanks! It is just a mockup I made in an hour or so, I would like
to have some real designer(s) involved in this to make it really better.

The current design is waaay better than what we had before and I thank you
on that! That change was really refreshing.
I just think that we should keep pushing forward. And I would also like if
you could be able to join me in a new redesign (if it gets approval), at least
in a consulting role. :)


[1] http://devdocs.io/