[Webteam] Some ideas to make it even shorter, what do you think? (Re: Frontpage - again)

[goran at krampe.se]

Hi Michael!

CC:ing to webteam, I assume that is ok.

Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg at gulik.co.nz> wrote:
> >Anyway, open for feedback. Shoot.
> >  
> >
> Bang! (Did I hit anything?)

:)
 
> There's waaay too much text on the front page now. Can we bring it down
> to one screen-full again please?

I just want to mention that I have posted both a "first attempt" and a
"second attempt" to the website list for discussion and that the
protests about length were... well, not so pronounced at least. :) But I
am aware of your recent postings on this (and your improvements - I
tried picking up most of them) and I did try to make it "shorter" but
wanted to get it up and see what people think.

Then Jason - who gave me thumbs up earlier - gave me a quick
confirmation to publish it so I did.

> You've also lost the "Next steps..." and "portals" sections below the
> bottom of my screen - I have to scroll down for them now.

Mmm, I am a bit "divided" when it comes to the length of the first page.
On one hand I too want it to be as short as possible BUT I also want to
convey to the visiting developer, right at the start, that Squeak is an
advanced real tool - so I actually want it to also have *some* real
content. So only having a few links and a "greetings!" on the first page
is not enough for me.

But I am listening to any proposals on how to make it shorter/better.
But to only say "Make it shorter!" doesn't help me much - I need to get
at least some idea on what to cut away/down or in other ways making it
shorter.

Ok, I am giving it a shot - what we have now:

- Introductory Squeak-is-a-blabla sentence. Can't remove that, right?
- Smalltalk explanation. Needed since the first sentence mentions
Smalltalk, right?
- Community run-down. Listing all different users, seems also a good
thing to have right from the start.
- Then comes the "developer teaser", the Squeak "kernel" bullet list. I
want this in some form or shape. We could try to "trim it" in some way,
proposal?
- Then comes the "on top of this"-paragraph showing that we have tons of
other capabilities, could also be trimmed I guess, again, proposal?
- Then there is the web-stuff-plug, I wanted to get it in somewhere
since it is probably the most important "developer attracter" at the
moment, especially given RubyOnRails recently. We could probably take
that paragraph and "merge" it with the Community-run-down above when I
come to think of it. That way it would come earlier in the text too. See
example below.
- Then comes the platform-list, could also be merged into the "kernel"
bullet list I guess. Tried that too below.
- Finally the license sentence, should be somewhere. Merging that into
the Squeak-is-blabla sentence would make it too much, right? Ideas?
- And we round it off with a second quote, we could of course skip
having a quote at the end - in which case that quote perhaps should be
used instead of the first one. Again, I tried that below.

----------------
Welcome!

Squeak is a modern, open source, highly portable, fast and full-featured
implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and
environment. In other words, it's pretty nice! :)

Smalltalk is the original object oriented language which still sets the
bar for object oriented dynamically typed interactive languages and
environments. You may be familiar with other open source languages like
Ruby or Python, but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further
offering a true uniform fully reflective environment - real live
objects.

    "The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer
revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of
money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor
adaptations of incomplete ideas."

    - Alan Kay

The diverse and very active community around Squeak includes teachers,
students, business application developers, researchers, music
performers, interactive media artists, web developers and many others.
We use Squeak for a wide variety of computing tasks, ranging from child
education to innovative research in computer science or creation of
advanced dynamic web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based
Seaside framework.

The Squeak kernel sports:

    * A largely Smalltalk-80 and ANSI Smalltalk X3J20 compatible
language and system libraries
    * A virtual machine written in Squeak itself, making it easy to
debug, analyze, and change ensuring the same behavior on the different
supported platforms
    * A bit identical compact 32-bit direct pointer object memory with
very little overhead per object
    * A simple yet efficient incremental hybrid generation scavenging
mark and sweep garbage collector supporting efficient bulk-mutation of
objects
    * A plugin system for the virtual machine with optional plugins for
most parts outside the core like networking, file I/O, sound and
graphics
    * Bit-identical execution including graphics on all major computing
platforms including all major versions of Windows, MacOS and Unix/Linux,
OS/2 Warp and RiscOS. And if your platform wasn't included in that list,
Squeak is easy to port. :)

On top of this Squeak has class libraries and virtual machine plugins
for very advanced multimedia including anti-aliased 2D and accelerated
3D graphics, real-time sound and music synthesis, MPEG2 video and much
more. In addition, it has one of the most advanced fully reflective
development environments ever created with over 500 addon packages
available for single click download and installation.

The entire Squeak system is open source software, distributed freely
with a liberal license.
----------------

Also, I proposed earlier that we put the "Main Squeak Portals" in a
"boxlet" on the right below the download boxlet - that would also make
the page shorter.

And finally, I took upon myself the "About" and "Features" page - so if
we improve those pages then we can use that to take some weight off of
the front page. But currently I think the need some work too.

Please give feedback on the changes above.
 
> Michael.

regards, Göran

PS. The Project page would be nice to publish - then I can link to it in
the "Main Squeak Portals" section like I wanted to. Sidenote:
www.alistapart.com is a really nice place to start about superb web
design IMHO.