Da Pondelok 13 Februr 2006 07:12 Tom Cloyd napsal:
> Yeah, well, too bad I'm given absolutely no reason to click past the front
> page. Don't you just love mystery meat? Not really.
>
> I don't understand why, if users are wanted, the hook isn't in the least
> baited. Am I supposed to go read the source, to see IF this is something I
> might be interested in?
>
> Worse yes, this is hardly the first time I've seen this sort of
> presentation. I don't get it.
>
> t.
>

I don't get your point about "mystery meat". If you get over the dog photo and 
headlines (d'oh, the content is in the content area of the page), the very 
first paragraph explains in a single sentence what the site and Mongrel is 
about. The next paragraph tells you how to use it on six lines of text, which 
is far more concise than most technical sites I've ever seen. And the rest is 
the usual, a mild sales pitch and (gasp) a direct link to the RDoc from the 
first site without having you wade through three pages of documentation 
indexes on a wiki.  

So, after going through the laughably little text on the front page, you 
indeed do know Mongrel is a web server, that it's written in Ruby, that is' a 
simple and fast one, and how to install, start and stop it with a Rails 
Application, and that you can't run it as a daemon on Windows and why. That's 
what I see without touching the scroll wheel and maximizing the browser 
window. Let's say I've seen worse. Especially considering you'll probably 
visit this site from a programming blog or this mailing list, where you 
already know at least some context and what you're looking for.

If anything, I'd complain about the left sidebar with the very tiny font under 
the photos, since those are tasks one might actually revisit the site for, as 
opposed to reading documentation, which is technically available locally 
after installing the gem. Then again, directly linking to subpages of the 
rubyforge project page is handier than just one link to it and leaving users 
stumbled.

Contrast to perl.org, where all you get is a cornucopia of links, with the 
first ones as amazingly relevant as "history" and "success stories". 
Python.org, the first text in the content pane of the page, where everyone 
looks first, the first thing is what software the website is hosted on, then 
some marketese "success story" quote (seriously, people, no one gives a damn 
about success stories), then announcements, then another pointless "welcome" 
sentence. and in the same browser window described above, that's pretty much 
it. Etc.

<flame>
Seriously, If you have to quibble about website usability, get some REAL 
arguments, instead of topical rants.
</flame>

David Vallner