Re: RFC: Website redesign

From: Jonas Fonseca <jonas.fonseca@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 14, 2008, 13:56 UTC
Message-ID: <2c6b72b30804140656g14c24d8cwae016d62fe12f4a7@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <3175605f-ff32-4fd6-bed3-7ae596ecbcde@q1g2000prf.googlegroups.com>

Hello Dill,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Dill <sarpulhu@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I was looking at the main git site and thought that maybe it could be
>  done differently. I tried to make it simple and professional looking
>  and have all the same information as the old site. I've spend a good
>  portion of the day hashing it out and wanted to hear what others
>  thought. Worth changing? Like it or not?

Yes, it is definitely worth changing. In all the user surveys to date people has commented on the design of the git homepage mentioning words like ugly, not useful, strangely named, etc. After the last survey I registered git-scm.org to have a more friendly name.

Question is what kind of "official" home page is suitable for git? As it is now, most projects using git provides documentation for what kind of workflow they recommend for their specific project, and else the git distribution point on kernel.org has the latest manpages, tutorials etc. supplemented by the git wiki.

Your examples capture this very good in the sense that the homepage should basically be a very simple page that send visitors in the "right" direction for getting documentation, downloading the latest release, and joining the community. I like the restlet.org page with its four basic tasks. As your examples also suggest and as a fourth task, it could be nice to also in time fill the void of having a news source about git related releases, developer interviews, GSoC info, the Msysgit Herald, and other interesting stuff happening in the community for people who do not feel they have the time to read the mailing list. This of course requires that there is a small dedicated team for collecting and preparing these updates. I would be willing to help, but have occasional fall-outs where I do not read the mailing list.

Regarding the design/style etc, I am credited for the current one that Petr forked from the ELinks homepage. It is ugly, and git deserved better! This is just to say that I probably shouldn't be part of this work. I find your redesign proposal 1, 3 and 4 a too dark or gray. Number 2 (git2) with its bluish has some nice ideas. The text might be too small, at least from what I am seeing and the list menu has a strange coloring.

If the home page should carry news it needs to have infrastructure so that we don't need to bug Petr each time it should be updated. I have commit access to the git-homepage repo and maybe Petr could add others as well, but the question is if we want some web interface for submitting news. I registered git-scm.org after the last survey and right now it is just set up as an alias for git.or.cz. It comes with some PHP capability which could serve as a place to develop a redesign, however, I am not hosting it myself and I don't know what kind of traffic will be required.

-- 
Jonas Fonseca