[racket-dev] Revising Racket's home page

> One I encourage us to use was Google Web Optimizer (free).

Typo there. I meant, "One thing I encouraged us to use..." in that
past life. We found it helpful.

(It's not really my role to encourage Racket doing this. Instead I
wanted to point it out as a possible option.)


On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Greg Hendershott
<greghendershott at gmail.com> wrote:
> I _really_ like the idea of giving it a fresh redesign and including
> more information on the home page.
>
> (comment (for-meta 1 #<<EOF
>
> In a previous life I've participated in some web site redesigns. In my
> experience people have many opinions with great reasoning, as well as
> style preferences. It can be difficult to get a plurality much less
> consensus.
>
> One I encourage us to use was Google Web Optimizer (free). This makes
> it easier to run A/B or multivariate experiments by assigning visitors
> different versions of a web site page. You measure "goals" such as
> reaching some other page, a download, or a purchase.
>
> How this can help:
>
> - You're forced to define the goals -- what do you want to happen.
> This includes who the audience(s) are. (Although there can be debate
> about this, too, it's usually easier to resolve, or can be stipulated
> as strategy by leadership.)
>
> - You can resolve some questions/debates with data -- one variation
> performs better.
>
> - You may discover some variations don't matter. On the one hand it's
> disappointing you don't get a clear "winner". On the other hand it
> shows you don't need to sweat that part of it, and should probably
> flip a coin to pick one and move on to other stuff.
>
> Obviously there are certain big things, like overall style or "tone"
> or "values", that can't be driven by data. But like goals, they can be
> stipulated by leadership.
>
> EOF
> )
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 5:39 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
> <samth at cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
>> Recently I (with assistance from Asumu) have spent some time drafting
>> a revised home page for Racket. A revised web page will nicely
>> complement the big upcoming release, I hope.  You can see the draft
>> here, which is ready for people to try out:
>>
>>   http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/samth/new-web/
>>
>> Some things to try out out: clicking the right and left arrows,
>> clicking the "?" box, visiting the RacketCon page.
>>
>> The new page addresses a few problems that I see with our current page:
>>
>> 1. It works well on small devices, which our current page doesn't.
>> Try it out on a phone or a tablet.
>> 2. It reduces the size of the top header, which will lighten the
>> burden on the documentation pages, for example, or the pkg index if we
>> add the header there.
>> 3. It puts more info on the first page.  This means that people are
>> more likely to see information about how to contribute to Racket or
>> approaches to learning programming using our tools.
>> 4. The font size is larger, which I think makes it much more readable.
>>
>> Perhaps more controversially, I adapted some prose about Racket from
>> Matthias' "Racket is ..." post, and added a tag line at the top.
>>
>> Lots of work is still needed if we want to use this as the basis for
>> Racket's web page (it's written in raw HTML, other pages would need
>> work, etc), but I hope that people like it enough to continue pursuing
>> this.
>>
>> Sam
>> _________________________
>>   Racket Developers list:
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