Python.org Redesign Preview

http://preview.python.org/

by LVB • 13 years ago

369 153 13 years ago

preview.python.org

rman666• 13 years ago

Looks great! Go for it. Then go talk to the PHP.net team about their disastrously ugly site, too.

endijs• 13 years ago

http://prototype.php.net/ feel free to contribute.

webbruce• 13 years ago

Huge improvement, that really looks great. One cool feature you could look into is an interactive terminal like http://www.codecademy.com/ has on their homepage.

taylorlapeyre• 13 years ago

Check here for an overview of the site redesign by the person who made it happen: http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/11/28/the-great-python-org-...

Great stuff.

rattray• 13 years ago

Great work! Some thoughts from a purely personal perspective, take them as you will:

- I often refer non-programmers to python.org when they ask what that "Python" thing I do all day is. If this is a significant portion of your traffic, I might move the "Python is a programming language..." bit higher up the page.

- "Integrate systems more effectively" doesn't mean much to me, but if the landing page is a tool for devs to convince their managers to let them use the language, could make sense.

- I don't love calling the list 'l' given that many beginners wind up here. It can look like a "1" to those not used to monospace, and is confusing. Come to think of it, the whole beginning example would be very obtuse to anyone not familiar with programming at all: one of the things I love about Python is that it's easy to introduce to a total beginner, with something like "it's like learning French or Italian, not a bunch of random symbols".

- I personally love the way you do the main dropdowns.

- The topbar is nice too, but a bit less noticeable to me than maybe it should be. I think some tooltip-provided explanation (or similar) of PyPi, saying "Package Index", might help those new to Python but aware of what a package index is. This might be unnecessary though.

- The location (and naming) of the "Socialize" link doesn't make much sense to me. What does it have to do with Search? Also unsure why there's the font +/- link there; do you often hear that browser settings are insufficient?

I'm exited to see what I think is a terrific update to the beloved Python homepage. Best of luck!

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

"I might move the "Python is a programming language..." bit higher up the page."

If you look at the site with a text browser like lynx then this is even more important. Lots of menus and other things that assume you know what's going on, then finally on the next page break or two an explanation. Make that all but topmost.

(And y'all ought to view your sites with a text browser once in awhile, it will give you a rough idea of the experience of people using browsers for visual and other impairments.)

andyroid• 13 years ago

If you're using lynx for browsing, you already know what Python is.

ciderpunx• 13 years ago

I certainly like the frontpage look, a lot more up to date than the current site. I tend to prefer less weight in the header on inner pages. While it is nice and prominent, it does push the stuff that returning users will be interested in further down the page. I really liked the popups on the main nav.

Skywing• 13 years ago

Looks great. That example on the front page might want to pick a different variable name, though. It sort of looks like you're using the number 1 as the variable.

brass9• 13 years ago

Looks awesome! A much needed revamp at last!

From now on, the snake will be able to compete head to head with a certain pink rock (in terms of attractive homepages) :)

jmj42• 13 years ago

Completely unrelated, but I love the "certain pink rock" phrase.

tudorizer• 13 years ago

The style reminds me of the jQuery site redesign, but python.org looks better.

artursapek• 13 years ago

Fucking sexy, only immediate criticism is the PSF link looks disabled because it's the only unsaturated label color. It feels very "coming-soon" and not very "click on me!"

ryantan• 13 years ago

Awesome. How about having a different landing page for non-devs and devs like drupal.com vs drupal.org?

bobx112• 13 years ago

Serif font makes the l look like a 1 in the code.

Stratoscope2• 13 years ago

@jacobian - hope you see this - it appears that you were hellbanned 41 minutes ago. I have no idea why - don't shoot the messenger!

bobx112• 13 years ago

I loaded the page in other browsers and saw my comment, but now there are like 20 others saying the same thing but my comment id is the predecessor to the one that's at the top (so i was first ;] ). what symptom tells you I was hellbanned?

cool-RR• 13 years ago

Looks great, now make the Python example actually interactive using a Javascript backend.

frankwiles3• 13 years ago

Great idea.

indubitably• 13 years ago

using 'l' as a variable name seems like bad practice… it looks like a 1!

Goranek• 13 years ago

agree, funny thing in most python books they always say do not use l as a variable name

ameen• 13 years ago

One of my biggest bugbears of learning from the official docs was trudging through python.org. Hopefully this addresses that.

Loving the redesign - clean, functional and pretty as well.

pekk2• 13 years ago

You had problems learning because you didn't like how Python's web site was styled?

joshuacc• 13 years ago

That wouldn't surprise me at all. The visual design of a website can engage a user or drive a user away. The current python.org just presents the user with an unfriendly wall of text which make it difficult to get one's bearings.

This is especially important for accommodating users with conditions like ADHD.

nebuchadnezzer• 13 years ago

I like what i see ! Looks a tad bit inspired from earlier version of tryruby.org, i hope they add the functionality .

droelf• 13 years ago

I like everything except for the search bar: The search icon is off, and the button is too high.

Also the «socialize» dropdown on that bar doesn't look that good.

insertnickname• 13 years ago

Guillemets are not used in English. Use “” instead.

pekk2• 13 years ago

It looks OK but if one is going to hire top notch agencies and spend a decent bit of money, I don't see why the design should look this dated and cluttered. Too many navbars and buttons everywhere and tons of gradients and rounded corners are emphasizing almost everything on the page. Isn't this kind of gradient-heavy stuff dated to 5-10 years ago?

wslh• 13 years ago

I suggest to add a slice example in the first page since it quickly makes obvious how Python can help you in writing less code.

It would be interesting to do A/B testing with different code snippets.

msluyter• 13 years ago

Looks nice, but my first thought when I looked at the code example:

  1  >>> l = ['spam', 'ham', 314, 23]

was "wait, how are they assigning a list to the number 1? How is that possible? Oh... that's an l". (Not a fan of that. I'm half blind (figuratively) so these things confuse me.)

s-phi-nl• 13 years ago

Yeah, please use a slightly longer variable name.

cas• 13 years ago

It's worse than that because the PEP 8 sytle guide specifically mentions to avoid using l as a name!

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#names-to-avoid

frankwiles3• 13 years ago

Yup, we'll change that. All of this content is dummy preview content at this point.

jacobian7• 13 years ago

Yeah, that example is a placeholder; we plan on replacing it with something awesome. Thanks!

reustle• 13 years ago

Replace it with a try-python style interactive shell!

Symmetry• 13 years ago

I'm sorry to say that using the same sentence to reply to different comments four times in a short period seems to have tripped YC's spam detectors.

mercurial• 13 years ago

I'd suggest improving the colour scheme of the code window, dark green on dark grey background is not very legible. Maybe steal some colors from the Sphinx doc colour scheme?

Mahn• 13 years ago

Ah, that explains it, I was about to post "wow, this code snippet does a pretty poor job at convincing me to learn Python" :-)

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

The problem is using Courier, not the example. Try 'Monaco, Consolas, mono'

hanula• 13 years ago

yup, that's a terrible example, not only because of the stupid variable name but poor example code choice. It's work in progress I assume.

shellehs• 13 years ago

I use customized font, so the number "1" looks exactly like the letter "l" here to see http://grab.by/kMFW

jodrellblank2• 13 years ago

Why would you do that?

wrboyce• 13 years ago

I made the very same observation when Jesse Noller first blogged about it (apparently as my very first HN comment[1]!).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842906

abc_lisper• 13 years ago

Yep, that was my first reaction as well. However, the idea of preview can be extended, codeacademy style. Make a small python interpreter in js, that people can try in, that gives them an interactive tutorial for python.

pxlpshr• 13 years ago

Love the design and architecture, and really love the success stories. I remember struggling to sell a dated financial enterprise company on the benefits of Python, and those case studies would have really helped.

naftaliharris• 13 years ago

It looks a lot better than the current site! A few criticisms:

1) The line numbers and spacings on the list example are confusing: The examples come from an interactive session, but the presence of line numbers suggest that it's a script. Also the spacing is inconsistent with what you'd get if you typed that into the standard python shell.

2) I think the drop down menus from the top of the page are much bigger and obtrusive than they need to be. When I opened the page, my mouse went over the "Success Stories" tab, and I saw a big white "Google" logo in the middle of the page. The eye is naturally drawn to it, and I spent a second or two like, "What is that doing there?" until I figured it out.

3) Maybe I would have a slideshow or "arrow-buttons" with more python examples than just the list. Basic usage of a list doesn't sell python as hard as, say, list comprehensions, arbitrarily large integers, and/or manipulating sets.

vannen• 13 years ago

Looks great; a great improvement over the current one.

pagade• 13 years ago

Under the font menu (next to 'Go' button) there is a small separator between 'Larger' and 'Reset' options. It does not have any label but acts like 'Larger' option and increases the font when clicked.

If it is just a separator it should not increase the font. Else it should have proper label.

moreati• 13 years ago

Maybe I've grown too used to the current design, but my first reaction is - yuck, too much like a http://everyfuckingwebsite.com/ clone. I'll try to articulate my dislike as something constructive, and submit feedback directly.

khet• 13 years ago

Sometimes the obvious problems are really hard to put a finger on. The new design for example tries too hard to look good, almost de-emphasizing the message.

The fact that they are even previewing the website with dummy content tells me that they are focusing on the wrong things.

goostavos2• 13 years ago

I think you did put your finger on it! You describe it perfectly. It's got that trying too hard feel. There's just so much of it. It kind of reminds of those fully flash websites. Too much "look pretty."

There's also a bit of information overload going on in the menus. I don't know. I'm not entirely a fan of the bold colors. I personally would have just liked an iteration of the current site, rather than a full revamp.

Something along the lines of Github's clean white background and minimalistic layout would, I think, suit a Python site very well.

I could just be me fearing change, though..

bmiranda• 13 years ago

This is an example of a how to do a great OSS website: http://git-scm.com/

Granted, it is a bit easier to make a succinct website for something like Git rather than the entire Python project.

the_mitsuhiko2• 13 years ago

I found it a bit disappointing that the divio slides look nicer than the final result. I loved the clean look of the original design.

aviraldg3• 13 years ago

Constructive criticism:

The shadow on the logo is too dark and looks wierd. Also, I'd put a call to action, like "Download" or "Learn" in a more visible format (maybe on a button) in a larger font, above all the "blocks", along with the content of the Statistics block.

The PSF block at the bottom looks out of place. (I really love the way you show additional information when I hover on the links in the second navbar. I'm not sure how that extends to touch based devices, but you could probably present the PSF block in a similar way.)

The "Socialize" link looks out of place too and should probably be on the upper navbar. (The other "actions" in that block are related to the site itself - search and text size)

I agree with the others that that code sample should actually be an editor with the ability to actually execute code.

jacobian7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, good stuff.

BTW, please do try the nav on mobile devices, especially tablets. They work there, too, and I think our designers did something especially slick :)

aviraldg3• 13 years ago

Just checked it out on my tablet (iPad) - I don't see much of a difference (of course, it's responsive!) except for the menu, which works pretty well :)

Minor points:

- When in "mobile mode", the search box changes colour so it doesn't look like a text input any more. I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

- I agree with the others on this one again: the gradients and the shadows are a bit excessive. Maybe you could try a "flat" shadow instead? (ie. a shadow with a 0 blur radius)

- I really loved the old docs search mechanism where the site had a local index of keywords and could search without hitting the server. I hope you don't lose that.

- I'm not sure what the concept of the two navigation bars is. What is the top bar for, and what's the second bar for? I see "Documentation" in two places. Logically speaking, I'd expect the upper bar to be the primary navigation, and the lower bar to be the secondary navigation, but clearly, that isn't the case.

Anyway, is this open source as of now? Where can I contribute?

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

It is great on an iPad. Works very well.

aviraldg3• 13 years ago

Here are some annotated screenshots of the design on my mobile devices: https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B2Fy-Q78JeVpV3UyOGpnSVZ0UV...

(The higher-rez ones are from Chrome running on my Galaxy Note; the lower-rez ones are from the stock browser on a Galaxy Ace)

interg12• 13 years ago

responsive.

gdg92989• 13 years ago

The problem with python's website was never that it wasnt "Sexy" enough to attract newcomers. Its that the documentation was never as well written or well organized as other languages/libraries like ruby and jQuery.

petercooper• 13 years ago

I'm a Rubyist but I find that curious because the more common public complaint seems to be that Ruby's documentation isn't as good as Python's. (And its official site is rather tired, to say the least.)

disgruntledphd2• 13 years ago

I really liked Python's documentation. I read the tutorial and it got me up and running really quickly, and whenever I had a problem or needed details of the arguments it was an invaluable reference.

Clearly, not everyone thought so. What did you not like about the docs?

neutronicus• 13 years ago

It's nice to learn from, but if you already know what you're doing and you just forgot the arguments to that one god damn method, it's pretty irritating to actually find the arguments to that one god damn method.

simonw• 13 years ago

Really? I've always found Python's documentation (especially the official tutorial) to be excellent. What do you think could be improved about it?

dgallagher• 13 years ago

A navigable list of objects, functions, and methods would be really nice, something like this (preferably complete): http://api.rubyonrails.org

Another suggestion would be to split tutorials/examples apart from object references. For example, take a peek at the Python Decimal module docs: http://docs.python.org/2/library/decimal.html#module-decimal

All the information is there, but it isn't organized very well. There's a tutorial, overview of Decimal and its methods (with tutorials mixed within), and various "notes" sections. It's all mixed together, and confusing for a new user.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of this type of structure:

    1. API documentation. No how-to's.
    2. "Guides" and How-To's

API documentation is like a dictionary. Succinct, to the point, not littered with "Here's how you write a sentence with this word" examples.

Guides/How-To's including examples, introductions to use an object, spell out caveats, etc... This should get wordy when needed.

Both could have links to one another. For experienced coders, you'll mostly just use #1 (which fits great in a navigable list). For newbies, #2 will teach you how to do things.

$0.02

testbro• 13 years ago

The documentation is beautifully written and perfect for learning, but it doesn't support the quick-fire referencing I, and I presume the other detractors, have grown to expect.

Contrast the first Google result for "python dictionary" [1] and "java hashmap" [2]. The Python result tells you about every data structure and does so in a story, the Java one gives you what you want and little more.

[1] http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/datastructures.html

[2] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/HashMap.h...

goostavos2• 13 years ago

I also think the docs are pretty good. However, the one thing I would absolutely LOVE is if they added a table at the top of every page that has functionName and return Type (like so many other languages do).

The thing that irks me about the docs now it that they're almost too in depth. Sometimes, when I just need to get a quick refresher of what function X does, it takes me nearly 45 seconds to just find the thing. Ctrl + F doesn't help because the docs are so verbose that searching for one thing usually results in 20+ hits or references on the page.

Just a little table like the Java docs, and I'd be pleased as punch!

obstacle1• 13 years ago

If Python's documentation is a "problem", then IMO the devs should continue doing problematic things. What in particular do you find lacking about the documentation? I've never heard this complaint before.

scott_s• 13 years ago

I find Python's online documentation to be fantastic. It's probably the best online documentation I use. I'm really curious what about it you find lacking.

x3ro• 13 years ago

The site looks good, but on the "Docs" sub-site, the fly-out menu colors are horrible (no contrast at all).

For example, this is a fly-out on the main page: http://cl.ly/image/0w2t0N0S3714

And this one is one the docs sub-site: http://cl.ly/image/1Z2S0p3O1e15

stdbrouw• 13 years ago

I really hate saying this because I know it must have taken a lot of work to get to this stage... but it looks very 2005. Fewer gradients and shadows and try to slim down the menus and columns. I know the current site isn't exactly a beauty, but I liked how it had a Wikipedia-like gravitas. This design looks too young for the audience.

Stately• 13 years ago

The previous one looked very 1998 so it's still a progress

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

I don't think it's that 2005. For example, it has RWD, which is wonderful.

fleetfox• 13 years ago

I don't think it's 2005 if it's not m$ flat.

JeremyBanks• 13 years ago

Take that back to $lashdot, please.

sauce71• 13 years ago

I was more in 2009, still, it has probably taken a lot of work and a lot of time so the design became dated in the process ...

meerita• 13 years ago

I felt the same. The design looks pretty older to me, as well those sans types makes my eyes bleed.

alptrv• 13 years ago

Why every second website now uses this -webkit-font-smoothing: antialized? Fonts look unreadable for me on mac os. Why to make a decision for user on how to render fonts?

EDIT: Made a screenshot to illustrate the problem: https://www.dropbox.com/s/orzn4f2utoxh4st/Screen-Shot-2013-0...

umrashrf• 13 years ago

So cool!

X-Istence• 13 years ago

When I hover over one of the buttons (About being the first one I hovered on), when I move my mouse cursor down and to the right at the same time to go click "Learn more about the PSF", i accidentally hit the "Downloads" drop down, which then appears.

At that point I need to move my cursor back to "About", drag down, and then right.

Putting a time delay on there, or that Javascript that Amazon uses for theirs that detects mouse movement would be fantastic.

frankwiles3• 13 years ago

Thanks, yeah we've heard that from several people and it's on the TODO list to add some hover intent detection for sure.

alexmic• 13 years ago

Looks great overall. I like the color scheme and the details.

Some constructive critisism and ideas:

(1) I'm pretty sure that the text in the secondary navbar is not correctly centered vertically. It's off by a couple of pixels.

(2) It would be nice if the code area in the frontpage had a chunky "Try Python now" button pointing to an online python editor, with a step-by-step teaser tutorial.

(3) The frontpage lacks a button to quickly download the latest version on my platform. I had to look twice to find the 'Download' column.

(4) The search box is a weak point. The magnifying glass is not aligned properly. The grey dropdowns feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the design. You're going for shadows and emboss, but that's completely flat.

(5) The position of the 'Socialize' dropdown is a bit random. It could be placed as another tab in the secondary navbar or in the footer.

notatoad• 13 years ago

I love it. The aesthetics are nothing special, at best you could say they are inoffensive but with a big community organization like python and so many opinions to cater to, inoffensive is probably as good as it gets.

More importantly, it is properly responsive, well laid out, touchscreen friendly, and a flexible enough design that it should be easy to add sections later. Everything a modern site should be.

azharcs• 13 years ago

I like the design but I've some feedback.

- Search bar has to be well integrated with the primary navigation.

- Alignment of the search text field & the search button.

- Search text field has sharp edges while the button is slightly bigger and has rounded edges.

- I think increase/decrease your text size is redundant. Your target audience is programmers or people who want to learn programming. They already know how to zoom in/zoom out.

- Instead of showing an image of how to create an array. Wouldn't it be awesome, if we create a simple interactive shell where-in you show how to manipulate strings (reverse, capitalize etc. It will get user's who are new to Python excited about the language and its simplicity.

How can I contribute to the project?

jacobian7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, good stuff.

As for contributing: we'll be releasing the code when we launch the site for real (i.e. actually replace python.org), and we'll certainly be taking pull requests. I'll also have some contributor guidlines written up by that point.

We've got some serious work to do first, though :)

jevin• 13 years ago

This website looks way too good for a programming language! Stunning!

smnrchrds• 13 years ago

It would look better if it only had one top menu bar with search box integrated in it instead of two menu bars with a search box between them.

nayefc2• 13 years ago

Finally! I really hope their docs improve because right now, they are horrendous.

jacobian7• 13 years ago

Do you think you can clarify? Most people seem to think that Python's docs are quite good — it's one of the things that originally brought me to Python, along with many others. If you can explain how they let you down perhaps we can do something to fix it?

nayefc2• 13 years ago

Sure. My main problem I find is actually finding what I need. Assume I want to read about the string split method. There are two places that I'd go to:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html

I know the difference, but that's very confusing and annoying. It might be easier to have all string methods in one page, but separate them in terms of built-in standard library vs. the module ones.

Then I came across: http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/lib/string-methods.html which is a cleaner version.

Another thing I found in string a few days ago: the difference between capitalize() and title() on std string is not clarified at all in the docs.

Siecje• 13 years ago

What was used to make the site? Django? Flask? Bottle?

FraaJad• 13 years ago

Django running on Python 3.3

bobowzki• 13 years ago

The example should be runnable!

isarat• 13 years ago

mainnav element is unnecessarily wide. Also too much of spacing between the elements in top-bar.

The margin to "About" in the mainnav looks a bit odd. Is it required?

The contents of the mainnav is oddly placed. I feel it can be organized from left to right in terms of usability to users. Like Downloads and Documentation first rest should follow in the respective orders.

The latest news can be placed somewhere in the first page itself for better visibility. Users has to scroll down now to see it.

paul4096• 13 years ago

Little thought: Wouldn't it be great to lazy load a JS live input console to actually try out the demo scripts on the frontpage? I'm missing those out for several language sites (eg Ruby).

espadrine• 13 years ago

This redesign is amazing.

Having a snippet of code presented to you is nice.

However, I wonder whether it'd be possible to provide a more hands-on feel, possibly through something like <http://repl.it/languages/Python>. That way, one can interact with the snippet of code.

buster• 13 years ago

Nice, but i think it is too dense with information and more confusing then the current one. There are those two big horizontal menus that confuse me and just moving the mouse over the first page pops up new menus everywhere.

I'd suggest: Put the main navigation bar (about, downloads, docs, etc) to the top and move the current top bar with links to the side, somewhere else.

Also Downloads and Docs is mentioned many times on that page, i'd suggest to leave the link to the Docs in the main bar and get rid of the other ones.

And at the bottom this whole page (takes up my whole screen) contains all this links again.

It's probably that way to decide which design way to go.. The blue navigation bar also is right in the middle of the screen, that's disturbing. The common way to display navigation is at the top or at the left side not right in the middle, where the content belongs (imo).

Anyway, keep going, you're doing a great job! :)

TheRealGL• 13 years ago

Really nice!

pan69• 13 years ago

Looks nice.

My feedback for what it's worth:

- The home page is very "blue". Personally I think this page will look better if the blue gradient in the background was a light gray gradient instead.

- Search icon needs to be lowered.

- Hovering the secondary menu is not a pleasant experience. I think this is mainly because of the white info panel in the drop down switch from right to left. It makes it look cluttered and disorienting. Another problem here is that there is a menu with drop downs in between the primary nav and the content. Moving your mouse between primary nav and content will bring up a secondary nav drop down which in my opinion is very irritating.

- I think how the menu is aligned under Education (overlaps the content) is the best way.

benhoyt4• 13 years ago

It is blue, but at least it's a colour, and not a bad one. The problem with gray is that it looks very, well, gray.

I had similar thoughts about the white part of the drop-down menu changing sides.

FWIW, I think it's a really significant improvement over the current homepage, which always feels like a list of mostly-irrelevant news links to me. This one has a code snippet which is a great idea (though I hope the content of the snippet improves!), and big links to downloads and docs.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

A few misc. observations:

* Too much of this page is spent on navigation and link lists. It's the landing page, but we don't need to link to every single sub-section of the site.

* I don't think having a whole sub-menu on the bottom of the page with various download architectures is a good idea. A single "Downloads" link would be much better, breaking out by distro on the downloads page.

* Ditto for a lot of the other stuff in the bottom menus. I understand we're trying to make things discoverable, but feel that you went too far in the other direction (information overload).

* The mobile style is pretty disappointing. There is a ton of wasted vertical space, and the vast majority of my scrolling is spent getting through all of the various menu levels. This could be trimmed down a ton, there's just too much. Strip out all of the ancillary links, stick to the core content, and make it easy to digest.

I make these comments because I genuinely care. I want to see the new python.org blow our socks off.

spicavigo• 13 years ago

You are killing it. Python.org should be really dry. The language is too juicy. I really love the way it looks right now. Moreover, whoever designed the new one, did a half-hearted job. It looks obnoxious. May be there is a design which looks better, but this definitely is not it. It looks like some corporate-y site, and worse, a really bad corporate.

asawilliams• 13 years ago

too much variation in style between sections. Some areas are very flat and 'Metro-ish' and then you have heavy gradients, extreme rounded corners. It just doesn't feel consistent. Looks like multiple designers were working on this and no one was talking to one another.

tonyblundell• 13 years ago

Looks awesome

obeattie• 13 years ago

Could the prompt on the home page be made to be interactive? (CodeAcademy style?) Seems a great way to get people to jump in straight away… and no better way to learn than by doing.

benhoyt4• 13 years ago

Yeah, that'd be a superb idea. Start with a really good code example (or a few really good examples that cycle between page loads), and have an interactive thingy. Like the Go homepage: http://golang.org/

walkon2• 13 years ago

Has some nice aspects, but that secondary nav is horrible in almost every way.

benhoyt4• 13 years ago

I'm not in any way related to this effort, but if you're going to give criticism, please at least make it constructive or give examples of what you mean. I certainly didn't find it horrible "in almost every way".

walkon2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I wanted to add that I agree with several others that the secondary nav is flawed, but couldn't really decide which comment to reply to. Most of the reasons to why it isn't very good have already been stated, but I agree my specific comment was bad because it didn't add anything new or helpful, other than "someone else doesn't like it."

PommeDeTerre• 13 years ago

I think that was an example of very concise and constructive criticism.

Sometimes just about everything is wrong with a given design, and saying so is the best way to express this.

In this case, it's pretty obvious that the nav buttons are uselessly large, the empty padding on either end is wasteful and annoying, the location mid-way down the page isn't practical, the color makes it blend in with the page's background, the drop down submenus make it awkward to find and get to the information being sought, the submenus are cluttered, and so forth.

The location is poor. The appearance is poor. The usability is poor. Using "horrible in almost every way" to describe it is very accurate and precise. It's just not the kind of thing that works after some minor tweaks; it all needs to be thrown away and redone using a different approach.

benaston• 13 years ago

Three "m" words: mystery meat menus.

wenbert• 13 years ago

Please use a serif font for non-Titles. Every time I read something online that is a couple of paragraphs long (eg: documentation), I always wished that they have a Times/serif font version of this document.

It would probably not be as "beautiful" compared to Non-serif fonts but it would certainl help my eyes (and I'm sure for others as well - especially if we spend hours in front of a computer screen).

nXqd• 13 years ago

it looks quite nice. Great work, guys ! I'm thinking about Vim's redesign. It must be done, what do you think :D

vasco• 13 years ago

In the downloads tab "Download for Mac OSX" is the worse choice for a default. Either choose the one with the most users (Windows) or the open one (Linux)...

ubercore• 13 years ago

These will by dynamic, as with most download links out there. OS X is just shown because that's what we've been developing with, mostly.

warrentr• 13 years ago

lookin goooooood

riotingpscifis• 13 years ago

What is the motivation to redesign the site, other than to make it look more web 2.0?

Jalevijo• 13 years ago

Looks pretty 'standard', but I love it.

zanny2• 13 years ago

It doesn't go full-fullscreen on widescreen, which ususally isn't bad, but I know on the old python (and at least the docs site) having the vertical fixed sidebar list was handy, and much more useful than one horizontal navbar (or 3, in this case... maybe cut down on the nav bars).

Personal taste, I prefer my sites with a fixed vertical navigation pane to the side when you get ultra-widescreen.

qoo• 13 years ago

I like!

xorgar831• 13 years ago

Love that it's responsive! I like it!

Skoofoo• 13 years ago

This design is shinier, though it feels uninspired and shows a disappointing lack of attention to fundamental design principles.

diiiimaaaa• 13 years ago

Stop calling all high-dpi displays Retina. I'm on Nexus4 and message at the bottom of your page says "Retina Display @1.5".

niyazpk• 13 years ago

Very nice work.

I am a bit torn on this though: http://i.imgur.com/QBEWQQc.png

It does not look simple enough with all the >>> characters.

If you are not familiar with the python shell, I am not sure that you will be able to understand which lines are commands and which lines are results. There must be a better way to do this.

More code examples would also be a welcome change IMHO.

webjunkie• 13 years ago

Okay who else hates flyout menus like these?

Shish2k• 13 years ago

When they don't implement the magical amazon triangle, yes

http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-... (discussed on HN several times previously)

mnml_• 13 years ago

I prefer the previous version tbh.

wasabian• 13 years ago

The `>>>` added to links with the `:before` selector adds a right margin that becomes an unclickable area between the decoration and the actual link. Using padding instead of margin will fix that.

amcl• 13 years ago

I may have missed it, but I didn't find a link to the wiki. I expected to find it in either the community or doc tab.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

I like it!

A usability annoyance: when I hover over "Blog", and then move my mouse to click the first blog article's headline, the menu changes to "success stories".

At [1] they discuss how Amazon fixed that (HN discussion at [2]).

[1] http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998

supervillain• 13 years ago

Looks and feels like ruby-lang.org

Just saying.

scott_karana• 13 years ago

I really like the design, personally. Well done!

Curious about the heading font used, FluxRegular.woff: does anybody know the source of the font, and the licensing? :)

Python.org Redesign Preview

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