Thoughts about the LilyPond web site

[Joram]

Hi,

thinking about it once more, I think that discussing a general redesign
of the web site does not make sense unless there is someone willing and
capable to do so. I am not, therefore I think this discussion can be
stopped here before too many people think about it and we end up with no
results. The content changes of the main page (examples, …) could still
be considered if desired.

Just for reference and for the case that someone is able to face this
challenge, I copied my thoughts again in this thread (below) to have it
separate from the thread containing the real and good work on the web site.

Cheers,
Joram




In general, I think, there are so many beautiful, modern, elegant and
responsive layouts on the web, that it would be best to find such a
layout or create it from scratch instead of infinitesimal changes to the
current design. To present a high qualitiy tool like LilyPond something
very elegant would be good – with notes (photography) like
http://blog.steinberg.net/2014/03/development-diary-part-six/
and probably instruments on the title page to attract musicians more
than nerds. Just to show what I mean:
http://klavierhaus-labianca.de/index.php/werkstatt
http://eu.steinway.com
There is nothing wrong with programming-interested people and LilyPond
profited a lot from many skilled ones, I just think “beauty”, “music”,
“elegance”, “artistic”, “perfection”, “tradition” should be mentioned
more prominently on the title page than technical things like
“stable/unstable”, “release”, “manual”, “bugs”, “crashes”.

Some more notes on the content (which is off-topic here, I know):
There should me more interesting content on the main page. All the
release announcements with their nearly identical wording get boring
very soon. In addition the list of contributors appears twice (for 2.16
and 2.18). This could be better done in some release log page decoupled
from the front page.

What I usually look for on such pages is: features, screenshots,
download, license.

What I would suggest:
- images of high quality scores (mainly showing the beauty of
traditional style typesetting but also some exotic ones) or only 1 or 2,
linking to http://lilypond.org/examples.html
- an (incomplete) list of interesting and new features
- notes on the latest release (but only this one)
- Keep the Best Edition award and the LilyPond Blog

Or (after one example image), three columns with:
features, examples, download.