As posted on the pypy-dev mailing list, here is a proposal for improving the website front page, and here is the image without annotation. Copying the comments from the annotated site:
Putting "A fast, compliant, alternative implenetation of Python" in the header you are immediately made aware of what PyPy is, and what it offers.
Putting "%420 faster on average" in the header shows the power of PyPy
Highlighting the quote from Guido at the top of the content gives credit to the project and might help aleviate some of the worries the future use might have.
Adding 4 points, with 4 words. What you get clean and simple. We can link from those to more explicit details.
Put the the blog posts right at the website, and not have visitors jump back and forth to a blog website (xref issue #3)
Make the "Download", "Learn More", "Donate" and "Contribute" link buttons.
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The site is built using the static site generator *nikola* (https://getnikola.com/), and the theme is in the themes/pypy directory. xref issue #8 to migrate the blog posts to here.
I like the complete logo more than the half. How would it look on mobile? Note we may need to make the "Who is using.." part of the page optional since we do not have a good story around that yet.
Let me try to ping @markdoerr and @cool-RR as people who in the past have contributed to the website. Let's wait 36 hours to see if anyone else chimes in.
Dear all, sorry for my long silence - I was pulled away by teaching, writing grant proposals and publications... I hope I find more time in the future. I am very happy that you started with a new web design since the current one looks quite outdated (and gives somehow the impression that pypy development is very slow ). Of the coloured ones I also like (as @mattip ) the pypy.org-0.4-yellow.png best - it looks fresh and modern. pypy.org-0.5.png is also nice, because it makes some design connections to the current page (so people will feel "at home", but still has a much more modernised look. Well done @panosl !
Looks good. In the mobile version the "learn more" button is hollower than in the desktop version, which is good because it makes the download button more prominent. So I'd use that on the desktop version too. Another nit is that I think the font used for the Guido quote is too wild. We're looking for "authoritative", not "writing a love letter in medieval times."
But that's just me bikeshedding, feel free to ignore and just use this design as-is.
Regarding the mobile version: the download button would be a little misleading, since there is (to my knowledge) no mobile version of pypy - am I wrong ? - therefore I would put more the PyPy features into focus/center: Speed, Memeory, Compatibility, Stackless.
With the 420% in the centre it resembles too strongly a selling app (e.g. booking.com).
I agree with @cool-RR that the font of Guido's quote should look "authoritative" - in the versions v0.4+ it looks "authoritative" enough to my feeling.
@mattip since you are about to do some bigger changes, you could consider generating the static html pages by the CI/CD pipeline (I think we discussed that a longer time ago):
So you might utilise the CI machinary to generate the static pages. You can stick with nikola - of even move to the python doc standard sphinx, like we do here:
https://gitlab.com/SiLA2/sila_python/-/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml
which results in static html pages of gitlab:
https://sila2.gitlab.io/sila_python/
It might make changes much easier, dynamic and future proof since every commit in master will automatically generate everything without human intervention.
Yes, let's move forward. A couple of thoughts before you get too deep into styling the theme:
How do you feel about issue #9 to add a CI pipeline to render the site and preserve the artifact for viewing in PRs? Is this something you think you could take on? On the one hand that would allow more people to view the work in progress, but on a practical level I think most everyone who would be involved would be capable of viewing the branch locally
hg clonehg up <branch>make venv_nikola/bin/nikolamake auto
I would like to get the blog posts migrated from morepypy.blogspot.com to here, and have opened merge request !20 (closed) with the content. There are currently no CSS rules for the comments. They should get some kind of treatment to display nicely.
#9 feels like something we could eventually have, but for now I'd like to focus on getting the implementation started, since I have to prior experience with Nikola. After I'm a little further ahead, we can revisit it.
We can tackle !20 (closed) sometime in between the new design development.
@panosl: for what it's worth, I am in the process of moving the web site source repo to gtihub.com://pypy/pypy.org, so if you are still interested on helping with the styling any PRs should be pointed there.