Add a Project Page

[prikhi]

Make something for http://prikhi.github.io/pencil/

[jdittrich]

Tech

Probably via a static site generator… Any preferred technologies? Javascript (since in Pencil), Python (like sphinx, used for the docs)? Or manually written HTML?

Content

Just a presentation of the tool or any additional things?

[nathanielw]

Github pages supports generating Jekyll sites automatically (and so also SCSS for styling) - see http://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/

I've put together several sites sites this way, and have found it to be nice to work with. I'd be keen to help out if help is needed (maybe also with the design side of things, unless someone else is wanting to do that)

[prikhi]

I was thinking of something simple: a short description, download links for the current version, doc & github links and a list of features with screenshots. This could all fit on a single page so I was thinking either just HTML & CSS or using some Javascript library as well.

I actually already did this as a way to test out mercury.js but I thought my design was a little off. Maybe mercury.js is too obscure of a library as well... I'll push it to the gh-pages branch soon so you can see what it actually looks like.

[prikhi]

I pushed it to the gh-pages branch, let me know what you think: https://github.com/prikhi/pencil/tree/gh-pages http://prikhi.github.io/pencil/

[jdittrich]

I like it.

Mercury: Interesting tool, but form most possible contributors a bit too unusual, in particular for this task. A simple one-pager is probably best build in HTML directly. Images: Great to have illustrations. The most images currently are concerned with diagramming, cliparts, libraries… I would suggest to focus more on Mockups, than introduce libraries/different styles, linking and then mention special features like cliparts, diagramming.

[nathanielw]

Looks good to me too :+1: The layout seems good overall, although there are a few design tweaks I'd make (Moving away from the default-Bootstrappiness and tweaking the spacing + scale of each feature section - I feel it's lacking balance).

As @jdittrich says, Mercury is maybe not the best choice for this. My main concern is that it means there's no graceful degradation (the page is actually failing to load in Firefox 39 on Arch at least half the time for me :confused:) and (while I love a nice JS framework) I'm a big fan of progressive enhancement principles. A preprocessor would do the job of generating things just as well, without the user having to (essentially) generate static content every time they visit.

Also, I think for any 'final' version the images and content should be completely original, rather than based on Evolus's website, just to avoid any legal trouble (unless the original site was also under GPL - I though I'd seen it in the repo somewhere, but maybe that was just the docs).

[Zyzle]

You already have the sphinx docs, why not just add some of the extra pages you mentioned here and push the sphinx build directory up to gh-pages using the git subtree command?

[jdittrich]

Any news on this? Like @nathanielw I think we should use something more accessible than mercury. What about using plain HTML+ Bootstrap CSS for now and pick a static site gen (Jekyll, Hexo or Pelican) later?

[prikhi]

I've got the majority of it rewritten in plain HTML & bootstrap, I've just been too busy w/ other work to finish it up...

I was thinking a simple page would be a little more "user-friendly" than using the docs, although that'd keep everything in one place...

[prikhi]

And yeah, I didn't think we'd use mercury - that was just me playing around & I wanted to share the design.

Static site generators seem a little overkill to me(that's essentially what I wrote w/ mercury). Maybe I'm missing something though?

[jdittrich]

Static site generators seem a little overkill to…

If it grows bigger we can still decide on using one later.

I was thinking a simple page would be a little more "user-friendly" than using the docs

Agree.

Thanks for making the changes!