DocPad.org Design Refresh

Ported from: Rethink the website design · Issue #47 · docpad-archive/website · GitHub


@balupton likes these:

@balupton thoughts on our current site:

  • so bland, there is no colour
  • the colour doesn’t communicate our values of openness, collaboration and possibility, instead it feels like a jail cell
  • the font type isn’t professional, instead it is loud and cluttered
  • logo is blurry, text should be text not an image
  • doesn’t appeal to anyone but early adopters

@balupton thoughts on other sites:

I started on this re-design last summer: http://mikeumus.github.io/new-docpad.org/

The idea was for it to match the new bevry.me design that landed last year as well. It’s missing some of the elements on the Ubuntu Desktop landing page and a few other things but what does everyone think of it? On the right track?

The source for it is at: http://mikeumus.github.io/new-docpad.org/

+1. Looks great! Good work @mikeumus

Can we change the colours too? Perhaps like the http://bevry.me website, that would be great. I can’t stand that yellow brown any longer.

Part of this proposal as well is that the documentation is moving off the DocPad website and onto the Bevry learning centre website. So we also have to do a redesign of that website too.

The Babel website could be great inspiration for that: https://babeljs.io (but without their yellow color scheme)

No more yellows, got it :+1:

Redesign all the leaning centre or just implement the DocPad docs into the learning centre style?
As if you look at the layout now compared to the babel docs it’s pretty close match with the fixed menu on the right.

Hi all - how about getting this moving again. I want to propose using a template, either free or paid for (HTML templates are usually quite cheap) and modifying/adapting it for our purposes. This will enable us to get a good looking site up quickly and cheaply. We can then change colour schemes, typography, images and menu systems (and probably get rid of any sliders!).

To get this going we need to decide between us what style of site we want (take a vote?). This is what I think the contenders are?

  1. Standard jumbo image style like meteor and babel: https://www.meteor.com/, https://babeljs.io/

Two (2). Clean corporate style like canonical.com: http://www.canonical.com/partners
Three (3). Break the mold style a little but still business like: http://ritenv.com/itercept-themes/glamore-update/preview/

Four (4). Very visual and creative such a roots: http://roots.cx/docs.

Despite my personal like of #3 I’m leaning towards #2 because of the corporate appeal.

To get things moving I’ve uploaded some mocked-up home pages to get an idea of what people think is the direction to go

http://testsite-stevehome.rhcloud.com
http://testsite-stevehome.rhcloud.com/index2
http://testsite-stevehome.rhcloud.com/index3

I like my landing page better still, lol, of course I’m bias but it should be included in the vote:

I believe further development has been getting pushed to:

http://docpad-jsonapp1.rhcloud.com/

Thanks for the update @balupton but we still need a vote. My design is cleaner and the template feels cheap to me. Also more professional to do our own open-source landing page design that’s fully branded our own.

I think we if we can get the plugins and the tech stack stuff from yours into the latest from @SteveMcArthur then we will be winning. I’m happy for this to come later, with post-launch refinements that can be as sporadic or as frequent as the pull requests come in. There’s been a lot of refinements over the past few months to get the entire @SteveMcArthur design for landing and other pages pretty solid.

I see. Wish it was discussed openly here or did I miss it somewhere else.
Cool yeah it looks good by me since you guys have been working on it.

:smiling_imp: :ballot_box_with_check:

DocPad was archived in 2019, deprecating the need for a full-fledged website. Its documentation and deprecation notice continue to live at:

https://docpad.bevry.me/