[Ur] New website?

[Torstein Saltvedt]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at csail.mit.edu> wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for their thoughts on the project web site. Here's my
> summary of the 5-ish opinions expressed:
> - It's not clear that the large background graphic from Torstein's design
> is the way to go.  Somehow it may be out of keeping with the "character" of
> the Ur/Web project.
>

Aesthetics are subjective, and although I think the current site looks
outdated, it's only one of the reasons for the redesign and arguably the
least important one.

Other concerns are:

*1) The lack of SEO.* Search Google for  for "who's using Ur/Web", and
click on the relevant link. Due to the use of frames the navigation is
missing, leaving the user effectively stranded. Search for "ur/web
libraries" and none of the results are the "Officially Blessed Libraries"
page on the official webpage (again due to frames, "Ur/Web" is not
prominent on this page.). Since "urweb" does not appear in the URL on the
official website, many of the search results come from third parties. For
this reason I highly encourage that the website (new or not) is served on a
domain like urweb-lang.org/com/net.

*2) Lack of responsive design.* The website does not cater to users with
small screens (on mobile phones or tablets). And yes, this is important! If
in doubt, add Google Analytics or something equivalent too see what
percentage of users visit the site using small screens. The number is
probably higher than you expect.

*3) Various usability issues.* The navigation is not consistent, for
example it's not present on the pages for demos or the tutorial. Generally
speaking you should *always * be able to navigate to the home page by
clicking on the logo of the site to the top left. There is no favicon to
make the website distinguishable among browser tabs. Frames are obsolete
and break lots of stuff like: the ability to link to or bookmark pages,
reloading pages, opening one of the main menu links in a new tab, search
engines, printing, accessibility tools for the visually impaired and
probably a lot of other stuff.

*4)* *Various other stuff.* There are no RSS or Atom feeds. The manual is a
PDF instead of individual indexed and searchable HTML pages. The wiki
design is not consistent with the rest of the site and holds some duplicate
information. The HTML is not valid; missing doctype and tons of other
issues (run it through a validator!).


> - Adding a live-coding demo section seems like a no-brainer.  I started a
> separate discussion thread looking for someone to spearhead an
> implementation.
>

This is a great idea.


> - Moving to Git & GitHub also seems like a no-brainer.  One concern about
> GitHub was expressed, regarding censorship.  I personally am not too
> worried there, as it's easy to maintain "mirrors" of a Git repository all
> over the place, to be ready in case one main provider goes over to the dark
> side.  The pros seem to outweigh the cons, considering how many potential
> contributors already have GitHub accounts and are used to using GitHub.
>

Does this mean that the project will adapt the GitHub Wiki, Issue tracker
and the Pull Request model as well? Will you still accept patches through
this mailing list?


> - It may still be worth tweaking the graphical design of the Ur project
> site, but I'm not seeing a clear consensus right now on exactly how that
> should look.  (I really don't mind the current site. :P)
>

To be honest, I think the current site is so bad that it is undermining
Ur/Web as a serious, modern web framework.


>
> Another very useful thing would be a tutorial that doesn't assume ML and
> Haskell familiarity, ideally written by someone beside me, since Ur/Web's
> design has been in some sense optimized for my brain. :) Any takers there?
>
> On 07/27/2015 08:30 PM, Stefan Scott Alexander wrote:
>
>> Also, "eating your own dog food" would probably be a plus. It only makes
>> sense that a website for a web programming language should be programmed in
>> the language itself.
>>
>
> I'm not sure about this one.  Ur/Web is for web _apps_, not web _sites_,
> so it may be a mismatch for a largely static site.
>

Agreed, but it would still make for a great demo.

The largest concerns would be SEO (every page would have to be indexed and
searchable by Google) and navigation/routing (back button should work
correctly; clicking a link and then the back button should bring you to the
original page with original scroll position).


-- 
Torstein Saltvedt
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