Rethinking the Phoenix landing page

[paulcsmith]

As discussed in IRC, the current website aesthetic is fairly generic and focuses a lot on technologies and not "human" reasons to switch. Compare the phoenix homepage to Ruby on Rails or meteor which focus less on technologies and more on what the framework has to offer developers. "Build apps that are a delight to use, faster than you ever thought possible" (Meteor), "Web development that doesn’t hurt - optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity" (Rails), compared to "A highly connected web framework" (Phoenix)

Goals for the redesign:

• More powerful branding. The current website blends in and doesn't have much emotion. I went with the Phoenix orange to make a more powerful impression.
• Emphasize the reasons for using Phoenix, not the technologies.
• Make it clear how to get to the guides
• Make it clear where people can go to get excited and see how an app is built.

My questions for everyone are:

• What made you switch to Phoenix?
• What did you switch from?
• Why did you switch?
• What led you to try Phoenix?

Note: when I say "switch" that doesn't mean you use it exclusively. It just means you used to use one thing for a given problem and now you use Phoenix in that scenario.

For me, it was the speed and syntax of Elixir and Phoenix. Tests suites ran fast, dependencies installed quickly and the framework itself was ridiculously fast. That wouldn't have been enough though. It also need to have a beautiful syntax and nice APIs. This is the only framework/language combo I've found that covers all those things. So that's what I emphasized in the mockup. I wanted to make it clear that you get blazing fast speed without sacrificing a happy dev environment.

Let me know what you think! Feel free to leave comments. This is very much a WIP. The real version would have real numbers and maybe even a chat with benchmarks along with some example code. I strongly believe that the screencast should also show some benchmarks at the end to make it clear that you're writing beautiful code and getting speed at the same time.

P.S. The content below the blog line is very much a WIP. I'm mostly focus on the header section right now.

[paulcsmith]

Cool. We can do html 5 then.

I definitely won't have time to do the marquee thing that Jason suggested in the near future, but I at least have the main styling done. Others can pick up the marquee feature sooner if they want though.

Also, I strongly believe that we'll want to use github pages for the landing page at some point soon though. The CSS is pretty gnarly on readme.io. Very susceptible to breakage and hard to override. It took much longer to override everything than to have just written a new landing page :)

On Apr 24, 2015, at 9:50 PM, Chris McCord notifications@github.com wrote:

Jason's idea is really great. As far as naming, I've never been a giant fan of html5, but it's the most obvious/succinct choice here imo. Jason's idea with a tag line that uses html5 could work well

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[lancehalvorsen]

Crazy Idea: A coworker described using a certain javascript framework like this: "jsFramework just makes writing apps fun again." What if we stole that for our tagline?

Phoenix makes writing web apps fun again! Be really productive developing extremely fast web applications.

The three words that stand out are "fun", "productive", and "fast".

Thoughts?

[josevalim]

Just a follow up. Is there anything we can do to help move this forward? Is there anything pending on me?

[paulcsmith]

@josevalim I don't think there's anything pending from you. I'm not sure what people can do to help. Maybe put together a markdown doc of suggested content that we've come up with here? Then I can style it and rewrite, etc.

Mostly I just need more time. This week and the next couple are pretty crazy for me. It'll likely take 1-2 months to get the content and design dialed in. Of course we'll see how that pans out in 1-2 months :P

[josevalim]

Is it ok if we get some more help here then? Because in 1-2 months we are getting really close to Phoenix 1.0 and we should be ready on this front. From the design perspective, what is the biggest missing block? Is it the three column-based subheadings? Is there anything else you would like to see?

[paulcsmith]

Absolutely. Don't let me hold up the project!

I can chip in with feedback as it comes along. It would be nice if we keep a PR open as it goes for feedback purposes though.

Design should be fairly straightforward. I wanted to add some benchmarks or graphs, but it's not necessary. I might be able to help with those later. We don't even need three column subheadings. We could just do a single column and be fine.

If I find time later I can come in and clean up the design and content. Is that ok?