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

[Michael van der Gulik]

Sorry if I'm being a bit brief and to the point. I'm not being rude,
just concise.

goran at krampe.se wrote:

>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?
>  
>
Agreed.

>- Smalltalk explanation. Needed since the first sentence mentions
>Smalltalk, right?
>  
>
Agreed.

>- Community run-down. Listing all different users, seems also a good
>thing to have right from the start.
>  
>
This should be on a "Projects" page.

If you want to give a feel for the size and activity of the community,
you could put the "Weekly Squeak" on the front page instead. If people
see that this really is a happening thing, they want in. Alternatively,
perhaps a front page full of project links is also good?

>- 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?
>  
>
This should be in the "Features" page. If people are interested in what
Squeak can do and are prepared to read it, they'll use the link. If not,
like me they'll just skip the essay and look for the relevant information.

Remember that not everybody who goes to the site is a newbie. Some
people, like myself, just want to look up a mailing list address for a
certain project or similar task.

>- Then comes the "on top of this"-paragraph showing that we have tons of
>other capabilities, could also be trimmed I guess, again, proposal?
>  
>
Features.

>- 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.
>  
>
If you really want to push this on the front page, that's okay by me.
But a sentence or two with a link is sufficient.

>- Then comes the platform-list, could also be merged into the "kernel"
>bullet list I guess. Tried that too below.
>  
>
This should be in the "Downloads" page.

>- Finally the license sentence, should be somewhere. Merging that into
>the Squeak-is-blabla sentence would make it too much, right? Ideas?
>  
>
There's already a "Licence" page.

>- 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.
>  
>
Cute, and fine by me as long as it isn't adding to a page as long as an
essay.

>----------------
>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! :)
>  
>
Bagh! Smileys! Shoot them! Also, "In other words, it's pretty nice" is a
bit too informal for my liking.

>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.
>  
>
Features.

>    "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
>
One quote is good. Two is making the site a poetry compendium.

>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.
>  
>
All that, and only two sentences! If somebody has come to the Squeak
site, they probably already know that or don't want to know that.
"Features", or maybe "Community".

>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.
>  
>
This won't make any sence to those teachers, students, ... and also
belongs in the "Features" section.

>The entire Squeak system is open source software, distributed freely
>with a liberal license.
>  
>
But this can definitely stay :-).

>----------------
>
>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.
>  
>
Good idea.

>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. 
>
Now that the community is using Teams, I think that the site really does
need a well-maintained "teams" or "projects" section with the project
name, description, web site link etc.

My justification for keeping it brief is that, if people are really
wanting to invest time to read all that stuff, they have time to click
on the links. I don't. When I go to a new open-source project, I usually
look for "What is this..." and then "Screenshots" and then "Downloads".
I don't usually read reams of text, and when I do, I've specifically
searched for it.

Most big-company websites are a page with loads of links. Most
Open-Source projects have a page with "News" on it, which is a good
measure of the activity in that project.

Michael.