[racket-dev] Racket home page proposal

30 minutes ago, Asumu Takikawa wrote:
> On 2011-12-20 08:02:15 -0500, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> > I do NOT like pages that have text below my laptop screen 'fold'.
> > My eyes do glaze over. And I am off the page quickly.
> 
> Taking some feedback into account, here's a second mockup:
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/asumu/racket-home-3/

This is exactly the kind of noise that I dislike...  It is
significantly wider, the color scheme of the twitter box makes it
stand out too much, and the same goes for the italics in the feed and
the large line spacing.  Oh, and we get to advertise feedburner &
twitter as well as longer page view times based on their servers (and
if they're down, I'm sure that the twitter box would degrade into
*just* an advertisement).

[If you still care to play with it: (a) you can try moving the
download link to where it was, (b) restore proper spacings around the
examples section (they're smashed together on your page), (c) I'd get
rid of the "why racket" section -- I don't see anything there that
doesn't induce yawnage, (d) it'd be better to have a mockup links &
twits manually done, to avoid the style issues.  But I wouldn't
bother, since I don't see any need for showing the too-few twits &
blog posts -- IMO it doesn't work in conveying activity, and in any
case it looks like such an indication of "active" is inherently
achieved by making a messy page.]


> It leaves all the content "above the fold" but fits in more by using
> a fluid 12-column based layout (credit to http://cssgrid.net/). If
> you resize the browser window it will re-align the layout.

Ooh, be extra suspicious of such things, as tempting as they are.
IME, they are much worse to deal with than the usual browser
incompatibilities in JS code.  Debugging clever CSS layouts gets you
all kinds of blood spitting because of stray pixel spacing, and there
no sane way to debug it other than viewing it in all browsers.  In
addition, they often require global changes to the header, which then
leaks to other places like the blog header, and things break in even
more frustrating ways.  On a quick glance of your page when it's
narrow: the exaples are completely garbled; the order of sections
becomes a mess of [propaganda] [download] [examples] [blog] [more
propaganda] [twitter]; the header seems to take the same space but it
is cropped at the screen width (actually the background image is
similarly cropped too); section headers don't have enough vertical
spacing before them.


> The extra content in the space is a twitter/blog feed in the mockup,
> but it could be something else as well.

I think that a prerequisite for any effort on this is an answer to
this question: what is an additional content that people *want* to see
on the front page.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!