[Webteam] Frontpage revised

[goran at krampe.se]

Hi folks!

Replying a bit out of order, but whatever.

Brad Fuller <brad at sonaural.com> wrote:
> I bet everyone is just busy (too bad "webteam" doesn't pay!). I just had 
> a few minutes myself - so I hope I can keep up my involvement.

Keep that thought, it is relevant to what I say below.

> maybe if we had a written agreed goal (just a sentence or two) of what 
> we want the home page to be, we'd have an easier time agreeing. 

I agree, and I will post about that next. :)

> For our purposes, I think the java site is good and represents some of 
> the items that I believe are relevant:
> http://java.sun.com/

Ehm, I have never liked their sites, in any shape or form. Don't know
what it is, but I really don't. Too cluttered and too many levels and
too much "enterprise mumbo jumbo" IMHO. And too much on the front page
too I think. Whatever. 

> I think they have a good order too.
> I like the "Spotlight" section at the top. Highlighting "what's cool and 
> current". I like it because I like to see what others are doing and what 
> I might be able to use too.
> 
> Next is "What's New". Both of these rotate frequently to show activity.

And now we get back to what you wrote at the top - it boils down to
*effort*. I will not have the time to edit the front page over and over
trying to make it show news items etc. IMHO we already have other sites
*for* this in the community - SqP, planet squeak, Squeakswiki etc.

If we could embed some simple RSS feed somewhere (another boxlet!) -
fine, but I strongly warn against trying to create 1) too much content
to maintain and 2) lots of "live" parts that we will not have the energy
to keep up to date. Hehe, yeah, you may laugh - but you will see.

So this affects how we construct the site IMHO.

[SNIP of comments on the varous cousin sites]
> >What I have done though is to revise the current frontpage according to
> >my last ideas trying to making it shorter - you can see it on
> >wwwtest.squeak.org. Don't publish this, I just wanted to show it
> >  
> >
> I think it's still too long.

Well, we are closing in on the breaking point for my proposed "style"
for the front page. I want to make the front page immediately tell the
visitor (who I consider to be a developer *foremost* - but not
excludingly) some hard impressive facts about Squeak with nice links to
boot.

I wish also to embed more links so that the reader is enticed into
clicking on at leat one of them and thus getting "sucked in" to more
substantial information, but we don't yet have good pages to link to in
all cases, for example each bullet in the list should have a link, like
"object memory" would be nice to link to a page describing it in more
technical detail etc.

Reading your reaction earlier and actually applying your comments seemed
to turn the front page into merely three paragraphs - the first two and
the last one about the license.

Sure, it is a minimalistic approach relying on the visitor to start
fiddling with the TOC on the left instead, but I am not sure I like that
approach.

> Oh, sorry, I didn't mention this before. I don't particularly think this 
> is good to say:
> "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"
> It makes it sound like Smalltalk came after Ruby and Python and uses 
> their concepts.

That I agree with and I had a bit of a struggle with that paragraph. But
as always - why not go the length and propose an alternative phrase
then? ;)

regards, Göran