JuliaAI
Proposal to redesign the landing page
I find the landing page for Data Science Tutorials extremely busy. The current organization around the four basic categories in the right hand menu ("Data Basics", "Getting Started", and so forth) is fine, but I'd like the landing page to be more focused on this question: "I'm this kind of user - so where do I start?". Maybe something like https://alan-turing-institute.github.io/MLJ.jl/dev/learning_mlj/ but even more compact (and prettier 🎨 ).
Thoughts anyone?
(On holidays so a bit slow to respond)
Just a note that the next major release of Franklin is around the corner (fingers crossed, this summer) and I intended to redesign this website along with the migration so it would be ideal to get thoughts.
I'll most likely use a standard framework like bootstrap to get a basic layout that works.
Some stuff that would be useful to know for the redesign is primarily how the navigation should be shown: keep as is (bar on the side, something similar on small screens) or something else. Having an example website with a good and simple navigation that works well is useful in this regards.
In terms of content on the landing page, I agree that it can be better structured to be more welcoming to users.
Lastly having a set of elementary tutorials like "a quick tour" that introduces the basics of data frames + MLJ could be nice (could just be a list of pointers to some of the existing tutorials).
While I'm happy to help out on the structure of content, backend of the website (literate files etc) and design, the tutorials themselves and content generally, should be owned by someone else.
Some stuff that would be useful to know for the redesign is primarily how the navigation should be shown: keep as is (bar on the side, something similar on small screens) or something else. Having an example website with a good and simple navigation that works well is useful in this regards.
I'm not an expert on this kind of thing, but instead of a menu with every tutorial on it, how about just the groupings ("Getting Started", "End-to-end", and so forth) in a horizontal menu at the top. Then a drop-down menu for each grouping to list the individual tutorials.
Once your on a tutorial, you don't want any clutter, just a way to get back home (or, ideally, to the next/previous tutorial in sequence).
Navbar are surprisingly hard to get right. Does this https://www.tutorialrepublic.com/codelab.php?topic=bootstrap&file=dropdowns-within-navbar kind of match what you had in mind though? (click on show output and change the window size to different representations)
Yeah, that's what I have in mind. But if the variable number of tutorials in each category is an issue for maintenance, it may be better to just open new pages with lists of tutorials. This might be better anyway, as we could provide more details for each tutorial, like we have at the bottom of the current landing page. What do you think?
that makes sense to me, so you'd have a nav with a few "topics" buttons, each of them redirecting to a "topic-index" page with explanations and possibly an additional navbar on the side to help navigation within the topic?
I'll be back with my main computer in a few days, will try to set something up to that effect
Yes. But, I'd prefer not to have side bar in an actual tutorial - the topic-nav bar header would be enough.
Conceptually the changes introduce a new topics layer to the site with existing content of the the landing page distributed out to that layer. The landing page is to be very minimal and to focus on quick re-direction to the appropriate topics layer. I'd be happy to sketch proposed content for this if you'd like.