[Nix-dev] New website

[Moritz Ulrich]

Vladimír Čunát writes:

> I might be in minority, but the current layout does seem weird:
>   - The first half of what you see is focused on newcomers (those who 
> know nothing about the project).
>   - The second half contains various types of news.
> So we have two halves with nontrivial content that are useful to 
> *different* sets of people. Newcomers will hardly get good idea from 
> recent news (as it contains mostly differential information), and the 
> introductory half will mostly be useless to anyone but newcomers :-)

That's something I noticed too. When I open nixos.org on my screen, the
'What's NixOS' part of the page actually drowns in news. I'd prefer a
much shorter news section pinned to the bottom of the page, which a
noticeable whitespace to keep them separated. Right now, the
news/introduction ratio is ~3/1, which is never good for a page which
primary goal is to inform people about *what* NixOS is.

Another thing is the giant header introducing NixOS: My brain
automatically skips such big fonts, as I actually find them harder
to read than "normal" sized text. It looks like it has to be this
gigantic or else it would drown as well. 

> Personally, I would probably convert the homepage to a simply structured 
> collection of most useful links, naturally starting with a big fat one 
> like "Introduction to NixOS.org", so we would "separate" this specific 
> group and could provide them *more* information (the half-page is only 
> an advertisement, and can't give a basic idea about the project). Direct 
> link to each of those "projects" would be nice, as IMO they're used a lot.

That's pretty much how it was on the old site. Imo, that was really
useful and a super nice way to get an overview of each of the projects.
And in a decent font size, too.

> News: currently it's more than one screenful of information (for me), so 
> I would again separate it into nixos.org/news page. BTW, RSS/Atom are 
> very useful for such things, and I see none on the homepage or planet. 
> Some build status summary might also be on that page, like the 
> timestamps+revisions of the latest channel bumps.
>
>
> Videos: I really prefer well-structured linked text (with images) to 
> videos. IMO a text of comparable value is much easier to produce. I 
> understand that videos are better at keeping attention of some people... 
> BTW we *do* have recordings of several introductory Nix(OS) talks, 
> notably the FOSDEM one.
> https://nixos.org/wiki/Nix(OS)_in_the_media_and_presentations

I don't think any video can ever replace an useful description. It can
extend, or better explain some topics, but imo it's *much* easier to
read a short pitch about something instead of watching a 20 minute
video. *Especially* when it's about something as technical as NixOS.


-- 
Moritz Ulrich
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