Too many things in the navigation bar on top

[ViralBShah]

There are far too many things on the top bar. I propose removing several:

1. I think we recently introduced ecosystems, but I don't think it should be there. I think it should be referred to on the community page, since these ecosystems are sort of micro-communities within the larger community.

2. Let's combine teaching and learning. It can be a list of learning resources, followed by a list of classes it is taught in. Perhaps for the list of classes, we can adopt the publications format for submission. Rather than have a comprehensive list of all books and all tutorials there - I think we should only have a few, with a link to the full list.

3. Remove GSoC for now and introduce it when we are accepted again.

4. blog should always be last, so that it is always in that place visibily.

Some of this is going to be subjective, but I think it is time to clean up the sprawl.

[ChrisRackauckas]

One thing to note is that I have been pointing students to the GSoC page when I introduce them to Julia. Maybe it is early but it is a nice thing to show.

[ViralBShah]

I am not advocating removing the gsoc pages - just the link in the navigation bar.

[MikeInnes]

Having submenus would help with this (easy to do with bootstrap).

[carstenbauer]

I think this is really necessary - We've been looking at this ugly line break for long enough :)

On a general note, what I dislike about the current navigation is that it seems (with some exceptions) kind of object focused: here is a blog, here are some downloads, here are some publications, here are the docs, and so on. I prefer some more user/visitor action focused navigation in the spirit of: Install, Contribute, Learn, and so on. Of course, in reality it is most likely going to be a mixture but the latter approach seems to be the one that should be preferred if possible. Examples in this direction would be maybe Rust and Swift.

I'd love see this thread not only lead to fewer navigation items but to such a change of style.

[carstenbauer]

However, let me ignore my last general comment for a second and just propose some changes within the current style.

In my opinion source (just a link to the github repo) and downloads should be combined in some way.

• The github repo is already - although without a link - the first thing that is mentioned on the downloads page.
• If I want to download the Julia source to build Julia myself I might click source on the main page instead of going to downloads -> source. I assume most people wouldn't be interested in cloning the master branch of the repo but downloading a tar.gz of the latest stable release.

I'm not sure if publications deserves to be in the navigation. Seems to me that it's too irrelevant for most of the general audience. (Of course I think it should be on the webpage but maybe not in the navigation)

Also, I'm not sure if GSoC - which btw breaks the general lowercase style - and even juliacon belongs in the navigation. I haven't clicked on GSoC once in the last year. And not only does there exist a separate website for JuliaCon but it's also only once a year, which makes this link almost irrelevant for let's say half a year, every year. However, I don't have very strong feelings here. But I guess a notification/banner of some kind would be more apropriate for indicating a conference than a permanent navigation link.

Those are my two cents and I'm looking forward to a discussion which will make the Julia webpage more transparent and inviting.

[ViralBShah]

There is some work in progress on a new design for the website. Hopefully that will address many of these comments. Will post here as soon as ready.

[carstenbauer]

Great to hear. Looking forward to get a glimpse.