Front-page content redesign

[Simn]

We want something like this, nicely visualized of course:

• Evaluating Haxe? We can help!
  • I have an Actionscript 3 codebase and need an alternative
  • Other people have done this before:
    • Link to TiVo article
    • Link to something about InnoGames and their approach
    • Link to something about FlowPlay and their approach
  • The conversion is smooth:
    • Link to something about as3hx
    • Link to a page that highlights some similarities and key differences between AS3 and Haxe
  • Want to talk to a human? Contact us!
  • I'm looking for web solutions
  • Similar structure to the above
  • I have a different use-case
  • List of various things Haxe has been used for
  • I'm not quite sure what's going on, can I talk to someone?
  • Contact us!

[Simn]

Some random thoughts over my morning coffee:

• This should be folded on the first level so users have to pick what they are interested in.
• The content should be presented in a summary + detailed way. For example, the TiVo part should have a brief introduction of what it is they did, with a "read more" link to the full article.
• The contact us page should have an email link to contact@haxe.org at the top. I'm thinking that it would be a nice idea to show our team page below that, so that users can see that there are real people involved with all this.

[Simn]

Here's some initial content:

--

Evaluating Haxe? We can help!

• I have an Actionscript 3 codebase and need an alternative
  • Other people have done this before:
    • TiVo used to handle the UI of their set-top boxes from a one-million-line Actionscript 3 codebase. They decided to port this codebase to Haxe and had some interesting experiences to share. Read more...
    • FlowPlay were looking for a new home of their VegasWorld.com Actionscript 3 codebase when they found Haxe. After evaluating various technologies, they decided on Haxe. Watch Doug Pearon's talk at Casual Connect USA 2017 for more information!
    • InnoGames are currently in the process of porting their flagship product, Forge of Empires, from Actionscript 3 to Haxe. They presented their progress at the Haxe Summit 2017 in Amsterdam.
  • The conversion is smooth:
    • The Haxe Foundation provides and maintains the As3Hx tool which converts Actionscript 3 to Haxe code.
    • The languages are quite similar. Check out OpenFL's Cheat Sheet to get an overview of the differences.
  • Want to talk to a human? Contact us
• I want to develop a game
  • Haxe has been used for many successful games:
    • Motion Twin have been using Haxe since the start and released a very successful game Dead Cells in 2017.
    • Shiro Games have had great successes with Haxe-powered games Evoland, Evoland 2 and Northgard.
    • Lucas Pope used Haxe for his critically acclaimed title Papers, Please.
    • Level Up Labs deluxified their popular game Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten using Haxe. Read more...
  • Haxe has a strong focus on performance:
    • TODO
• I'm not quite sure what's going on, can I talk to someone?
  • Contact us

[Merelleya]

Love it!

[dagnelies]

Hi,

IMHO the current front page is content-wise still worse than the site in the old days. Sorry to be blunt, but if it was me, I'd just put back the old site. I found it superior in many ways because you basically found what you looked for.

The central question for the front page should be "what is haxe?" and "why should you use it?". IMHO the current frontpage fails to deliver on both, while the old site did it fairly well. It instead offers verbosity instead of conciseness.

So please, just keep it about the language itself, matter-of-factly, with plenty of examples. Don't try to sell me something, just show me what haxe is.

---

My ideal front page would be:

First, the current second block with "With Haxe, you can easily build cross-platform tools targeting all the mainstream platforms natively...."

Then a sequence of code snippets showing the features of the language, possibly with an embedded version of the "try haxe" editor.

Lastly, links to tutorials, docs, tools, libraries, users.

[markknol]

Hi, thanks for your feedback. This issue is there because we work on a new frontpage.

[uvtc]

Not sure this is relevant to this particular issue, but I wanted to comment on one specific aspect of the front page content: why does it refer to Haxe as a "toolkit" rather than a programming language? This is one thing that threw me the first time I ran across Haxe. I wasn't sure what it was. "Toolkit" here doesn't seem to me to be common terminology.

When I hear the word "toolkit" I think of the GNU binutils, or maybe a set of harddisk diag utilities.

For comparison, here's what some other programming language front pages say:

• "Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively."
• "JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight interpreted or JIT-compiled programming language with first-class functions. While it is most well-known as the scripting language for Web pages, many non-browser environments also use it, such as Node.js, Apache CouchDB and Adobe Acrobat. JavaScript is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm, dynamic language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and declarative (e.g. functional programming) styles." (I know, this is just the JS MDN page)
• "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety."
• "TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript"
• "Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software."
• "Perl 5 is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development."
• "D is a general-purpose programming language with static typing, systems-level access, and C-like syntax. With the D Programming Language, write fast, read fast, and run fast."
• "Ruby is... A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write."
• "Nim is a systems and applications programming language. Statically typed and compiled, it provides unparalleled performance in an elegant package."

(I include Nim partly because I like how it distinguishes between systems and applications programming.)

And those languages all are language + implementation + standard library, very much like Haxe, correct?

I think it would be clearer if the Haxe front page said something like: "Haxe is an open source high-level strictly-typed programming language with familiar syntax and modern features. Haxe has its own VM, and can also cross-compile to a large number of targets and platforms with ways to access each platform's native capabilities."