[zeromq-dev] Website -- separating newbies from the community

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik at 250bpm.com> wrote:

>> Also can we use standard links, "Documentation", "Get Started",
>> "Download", "Community", "Services" etc.
>
> +1
>
> The big verbs are useless as you have to read the small nouns underneath
> anyway to know which button to press.

You have five buttons, and honestly, the first time you visit the site
you press them all in order and see what happens.  Magically it makes
sense because they're ordered according to what new visitors need.
The words don't mean much except as placeholders.  They could be
images, it'd work just as well (and perhaps we'll use images in the
future).

The better is the enemy of the good.  Let's focus on what _actually_
makes life hard for users, which is:

* lack of a formal 2.1.0 release (even unstable)
* too many steps to get a 0MQ + language binding working
* only one language apart from C/C++ properly documented for these
steps (Python)
* documentation spread out all over the place
* no consistent overview of what 0MQ projects exist and who to contact for them
* not enough worked examples in different languages
* lack of useful and reusable layers above 0MQ

(All of which we're working on but which aren't helped by spending
more time twiddling five words).

I'm not going to spend more effort, right now, on improving the look
and feel of one web page as if that's somehow going to make life
easier for our users.  Later, when this set of changes has had time to
settle.

-
Pieter Hintjens
iMatix - www.imatix.com