TrenchBroom Website: Design a modern and more promotional website

[jonathanlinat]

The main idea is to redesign the current website in order to use modern web practices and to promote the main features of the application.

References

• Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/la/creativecloud.html
• Autodesk: https://www.autodesk.com/products/3ds-max/overview
• Unity: https://unity3d.com/unity
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/features

[kduske]

A couple of points:

• it must be able to run on github pages
• it should be as simple as possible, without excessive use of javascript libraries or css
• it should be one page with as little text as possible
• it should be easy to update with a text editor only (hence no or just a little bit of javascript and css)

[jonathanlinat]

What do you mean by it must be able to run off github pages? You don't want it to be hosted on GitHub?

[kduske]

No, I do want it to run on github pages. Sorry for the confusion.

[fnky]

What about dependencies for building and publishing content to the site?

There are a ton of static site generator tools written for different environments like Node.js, Go, Rust, etc. which each have their own requirements to setup.

Ideally it would be nice to just write content in Markdown and include those as building blocks in a template, so that you won't have to mess around with HTML/JavaScript (JSX).

[kduske]

I prefer simple HTML plus light use of JS and CSS. I don't want to maintain another build process just for the website, which is supposed to be very simple and rarely updated.

[jonathanlinat]

What about dependencies for building and publishing content to the site?

There are a ton of static site generator tools written for different environments like Node.js, Go, Rust, etc. which each have their own requirements to setup.

Ideally it would be nice to just write content in Markdown and include those as building blocks in a template, so that you won't have to mess around with HTML/JavaScript (JSX).

That's a great idea. Unfortunately, I don't think Kristian will want to edit the textual content or write down blog articles.

I'll just code a simple HTML/CSS website and use Webpack to minify the dist version.

I'll create two branches: one for the website source files and the other (gh-pages) for the compiled ones. gh-pages will have to be connected to the main .com domain. In the future, I'll explain the process to compìle (minify / optimize) and automatically publish it to the gh-pages branch.

[kduske]

Why does there have to be any kind of compilation step? The design should be simple, I don't see a need for this.

[jonathanlinat]

Why does there have to be any kind of compilation step? The design should be simple, I don't see a need for this.

The compilation step may help to optimize the website for mobile devices. I can confirm that it's not a mandatory option.

So yeah, I'll code it without need of compilation step as requested.

[fnky]

Since the page is pretty much just going to be more of a single page kind of thing, than a full-fledged blog or web app it should be simple enough just with plain CSS (and minor uses of JavaScript).

The idea behind the site generators would just make it simpler to update individual parts in as simple language as possible, without the need to touch schematics. It could also help optimize the site to become as minimal on resources as possible.

But seeing the scope of the website for now, I think the build processes just adds more time and weight than the opposite. It's likely that the actual code is smaller than the wrapper of a build tool and its potential polyfills—even minified would be.