kivy-website
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kivy
Create a new site for Kivy - ideas and suggestions
This issue will be mainly used for discussing possible design routes for our new site.
Please comment here if you have any suggetions about how the site should look like or what it should contain, links or screenshots that illustrate your idea are recommended.
We could probably embed a Getting Started with Kivy video tutorial on the website.
I don't know. Do you really need to waste resources on new website? What's wrong with current version?
Issues with current website:
- is not mobile friendly.
- lacks a testimonial section
- lacks a donation section
- lacks a section to refer to external resources about kivy (like screenings of presentations around the world, that are currently in #aboutus)
- can hardly give space to more sections in its current form.
- isn't easy to maintain (direct edit of html/js code)
- is messy in about every sections
- doesn't look trendy … maybe more.
@ohaz @KartikKannapur thanks, we will take this into account.
@aq1 the reason for creating a new site is to open up kivy for more users (+ contributors) and help them make their first steps in an intuitive way, as tshirtman explained, the current site does not meet this goal.
A small summary of things suggested on facebook:
- Video tutorial(s) for apps like list app/ to do app, drag and drop app, quiz app, flashcard app
- Video that shows how easy the build process for the different platforms is
- Contest is too dominant on the front page (I personally think that might be because of it being over for quite a while already now)
I think the main issue people have is that the main page should contain tutorials on how to get into kivy. They like our documentation, but getting good enough in kivy to use it seems to be the problem.
I have mixed feelings about this. I can understand the mobile friendliness requirement though. As someone who joined this year at the time of the contest, I can say that things aren't that bad. However, I can suggest adding more tutorials beyond the pong game. Especially linking to kivycatalog, which is currectly in getting started.
Another major thing, is to update the documentation regarding the building process on each platform. If I wasn't dedicated, I wouldn't have been able to solve the major issues. An example is this:
cd ~/android/python-for-android
git clean -dxf
git pull
This is what is mandatory for the VM used to publish on Android. Unless you find this information you are stuck. It's likely that many people just give up based of things like that alone.
i'd vote against mimicking kivy's theming for the website, it's probably a lot of work, will make people think kivy can target web (creating more confusion), give the impression that kivy-theme is a constraint for our designs (when it's not), and even prevent us from evolving the kivy theme if needed, sorry, but i see only downsides to this idea.
- make a base for the theme than can be reused for the documentation (at least the header/content/footer), garden (future website where we can browse / have more informations about garden repos), documentation
- don't show Kivy as a whole. Have a better approach that shows the Kivy project as multiples tiny project, where all of them fit to target a platform. At least, imo, the frontpage should not shows only Kivy itself now.
I'm thinking of this for the front page, above the fold (this is just a mockup with placeholders, disregard text, images, fonts, colors, etc.):
- this layout would send a strong message to the visitor: there are real world kivy apps and they are awesome ;)
- it would put our main goal front and center: explore kivy and download it
- a video loop would increase our retention rate in those first couple of seconds, and would appeal to non-technical people
- the code snippet would engage developers, they could also visit the app's repository
- a Learn more/Explore link would send them below the fold, this is where we would present some of the best features of kivy and its ease of use, give a glimpse of our community, it should appeal to devs, hobbists and bussinesses (the layout and content of this is largely unknown, we need more tips).
This whole thing could be a carousel so we can show multiple apps. @tito recently did a gorgeous app with a bubbly interface for a museum, that would be a pefect fit for a featured app.
The biggest shift compared to the old site, besides the layout, is that we will treat the front page as a sales page which has a clear goal, to make conversions. Once ready, we could a/b test different apps as fist slides, text below the fold, to see what makes more people interact with the site and download kivy.
Please do tell your opinion about this, what would you change or improve?
I would prefer if the carousel had manual navigation ("continue to X", "back to Y" for example). Maybe add a carousel to gallery and do the app showcase there. I think it makes the focus more clear for both of them (ie discovering the project(s) from the frontpage and a showcase of what can be done).
@bionoid, yes i will be manual (i'm also an auto-sliding carousel hater :)). We will have a showcase/gallery page which can contain more examples of released apps, even a short intro about each etc., but i find it important to have this carousel on the front page, as we suffer from people not knowing what kind of apps can be built with kivy.
Both you and @tito mentioned giving our other projects space on the home page, i fully agree with that, we could have the most popular ones mentioned below the fold, where the other stuff will be presented.
And we definitely need a dedicated Projects page where each of them are presented in a detailed way, maybe each could have it's own page, this way they would get more screen space for presentation and even a short code snippet that shows a cool feature of the respective package.
Waht about kivy planet, it's an important resource, even if outdated... please.
@victor-rene we could have a blog, but with our own content, these planet style article reposts hurt our ranking and google penalizes us (duplicate content).
we should certainly have more blogs on the planet, would put some life here. (but that's another issue, i guess)
edit: didn't see the info about planet being bad for ranking, would be good to fix it if possible, maybe some nofollow style fix?
@dessant I agree it should be promoted on the front page of course, to clarify: I would prefer not to "sporadically" mix it in, but rather have a single point of entry for the gallery (a "see what kivy can do" slide together with the current featured app, for example - ie don't have multiple slides for this purpose on the frontpage)
I like the general content of the current site, in particular:
- big landing image (currently the carousel)
- basic information (currently the 3 columns)
- code example (currently the hello world - but I think this could be improved)
- social links
- example apps, in a testimonial role), this could be improved since the carousel doesn't present them that well
In terms of presentation, I generally like the balance of the current site with the carousel being not too big and giving way to further information.
Particular improvements I would pick out as wanting are:
- better app example links (as you propose)
- more technical information, e.g. a brief project overview and also subproject mentions on the frontpage. For instance, haxe do this further down their page.
- better code examples/github links - the hello world is good but not actually that useful for anyone.
I think this meshes with what you propose, but anyway, it's my perspective.
I'd love to see something that matplotlib has; galleries. This is similar to what has been mentioned by others, but basically, either have a whole separate section, or for each mod, e.g. BoxLayout have at the bottom of the page a gallery showing different snippets and how the result looks. This way, we can easily showcase the various usages of mods, while making it easier for devs at a glance to find the correct snippet to use in their project.
Some information I think is important to convey:
- We are not based on PyGame in any real sense. Often times the role of providers within Kivy I think is very misunderstood. In many ways, our provider setup is one of the biggest strengths of Kivy: it is kivy's abstraction over multiple providers that ensures developers have the freedom to publish what they want where they want, and the ability to solve any potential technical challenges related to their platform or use case.
- Others have said, but I think we need to give more precedence to the other parts of the Kivy ecosystem. Pyjnius, pyobjus, python-for-android, kivy-ios, and so on, all of these projects contribute significantly to making Kivy as useful of a development tool as it is, and it is in these projects that much of the cross-platform goodness comes to be. Kivy is far more than just a UI framework.
- We need to have an area where we spotlight applications being made by our community. Over time this will become one of the best ways to demonstrate the different types of applications that can be made with Kivy. In addition, this also helps strengthen the exisiting developers within our community, using the reach of kivy.org to inform others about all the cool things they are up to.
- Someone else has mentioned the kivy planet, I do think that we may need to ensure we are publishing more blog posts and such about Kivy itself. These blogs could demo interesting features of kivy or discuss future developments and experimental projects and such. The whole goal here should be to provide a window into the way the developers of kivy think and approach things, and perhaps show off at a more indepth level of detail some of the things the developers get up to. This could be very helpful for those kivy developers out there who are looking to dive deeper into how Kivy works or want to know more about the future of development.
The primary thing about points 3 and 4 is to present a more active face to the community for the Kivy organization, and to support the community with the reach Kivy itself have. In turn, this will underline how active development is and give back to our adopters by showing off what they are up to!
We need to have an area where we spotlight applications being made by our community. Over time this will become one of the best ways to demonstrate the different types of applications that can be made with Kivy. In addition, this also helps strengthen the exisiting developers within our community, using the reach of kivy.org to inform others about all the cool things they are up to.
This could be linked to the app of the month we want to introduce in the social networks ( https://github.com/kivy/kivy-ideas/issues/1 )
I'm just dropping by to say that I found some content on the github wiki. How much is still up to date, I can't know. This led to think about a few boring things, please bear with me.
I firmly believe, accurate documentation can be as or even more important than aesthetics, on the technical side of things. Much of the "adoption rate" of any framework, in my experience comes from smoothing the learning curve. However, in the current state, there seems to be a significant release gap / update delay / info spread, (whatever the real cause) that makes it really hard at times to go forward on projects.
I also tend to think, streamlining tests and releases, will definitely force the allocation of time for those documentation tasks. Let's say the release schedule is every 4 months, then at worse, Kivy users know the information delta can't be that great between the dev version and the last stable. This is even more important, considering the fact that Kivy relies on other open-source tools and frameworks who are constantly evolving on their own.
If that point can be improved, and look "mature enough" this will help changing how the framework is perceived from a "quality" standpoint. Maybe a good example is web2py. On the first page, we see:
- All in one package
- IDE (with debugger)
- Extensive docs
It is very crystal clear what you get. Voilà, that was just some food for thought.
I really like the basic template with a short list of links, headings that say why I should use Kivy, that it is MIT and uses OpenGL. If you wish to show how easy it is, there should be a link where people who are already python developers can read a brief overview of specs, then do the typical hello world example, then read a brief description of how Kivy is structured, how to read the API, and a link to the API/Docs on the front page for super fast access like pygame has (Love the way pygame's API is setup FYI, horrible for newbies, but great for someone who just needs to know what to do to pan a sound to the left).
On the front page though, I don't think we should have more than 10 links in the side bar. I like the simplicity and header and list delineation that is currently in place. On the bottom of the page there should be a link to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and what ever else. I don't know what the website uses, but just FYI, in WordPress, there are some very nice tools for managing all the social networks at once.
For newbies, There should be a "learn python with Kivy" tutorial. There you can point to other tutorials as further and more advanced reading, but the last thing a potential game developer who stumbles on Kivy needs is a 60 module tutorial telling them how to use python, and nothing on how to use Kivy, then a quite extensive and over-whelming description of Kivy architecture and API.
Combining the two together (for newbies and python developers) just leads to confusion.
I wouldn't have any videos that are not Kivy made or on Kivy's channel on the front page. The page should be super simple, sleek and, like Kivy, nearly the same on mobile and desktop.
@inclement proposed an example gallery like http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html (ignore the theme), it would definitely help newcomers.