"homepage-cask" - let's make a nice landing site for our project!

[phinze]

I've been starting to think about a 1.0 release, and one of the things I like up and running before than is a solid landing page for this project.

I'd like to use this issue to gather ideas and discuss drafts for the site.

A rough list of things I'd like to see the landing page accomplish:

• Very quickly answer "What is homebrew-cask"
• Demonstrate super-fast quickstart - show how simple it is to use; focus on hands-on
• Show how easy it is to create a cask and contribute
• Display a pretty listing of all the available casks (refs Cask Categories #198 - I think this would help a lot with discoverability)

Here are a few to kick us off for inspiration:

• http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/ - papa bear
• http://boxen.github.com/ - never have puppet modules been so sexy

Feel free to include other landing pages you think work well.

Should we use a custom domain, or stick with github page?

Many options:

• homebrewcask.{org,io}
• homebrewca.sk
• brewcask.{org,io}
• brewca.sk
• bcask.io
• hyphenated versions of all the above

There's a ton to comment on here - please join in! This'll be fun. 🌐 🎊

[vitorgalvao]

I’m personally not a fan of the “brewca.sk” url style — in conversation you always have to repeat and explain how it’s written. Same thing with the hyphenated version.

Regarding the homepage, I’m more in favor of the homebrew style, for this. Straightforward, fast, no cruft. Some kind of sublime text 2 animations could possibly work, but I wonder if it’d add anything, in this case.

I think it should be something dead‐simple. Good‐looking and informative homepage, with a section to present the apps (maybe here the categories could apply? I’m still not sure how we’d define them accurately, I’ve honestly never seen appealing software categorisation, the best apps you always want to stick in “other”). I’m stressing simplicity since there are a lot of apps out there, and as homebrew‐cask grows, so will the number of apps to feature, which can get out of control quickly with a complex system.

I’ll maybe be able to kick around some html/css ideas soon, but I think there’s things we should think about first. Namely that there are already a ton of app‐discoverability websites out there, like i use this, and to me, they all seem to suck. It’s not that they’re awful interface‐wise or anything (well, some are), but there are just too many crappy apps, that all end up overwhelming the niche‐good apps. So you give up and end up only knowing about the popular apps, which are always the same. Now, we can’t really curate the apps that get into homebrew‐cask, as that would decrease its usefulness and would go directly against its purpose, but I ask “do we really need to feature the apps on the website?”. Again, there are just too many (which is why there are websites that list them all, and others that just list “the best” — which once more end up being always a variation of the same popular ones).

I don’t want to be too harsh, as after all I really enjoy this project and contributing to it a lot, but I believe the reason discoverability seems so appealing right now is due to it having relatively few apps. When this projects grows some more in number os casks (and it’s getting there), you’ll just think “wow, this is too much, I won’t look through all that”. And frankly, I think that is fine. This project is great, and it’s goal/usefulness is closely tied with the quantity and maintainability of casks. I propose (and maybe I’m wrong) that most users find an app online and then think “I wonder if this is in brew or cask”, not the other way around (honestly, when was the last time you looked through homebrew’s (the main one) catalogue)?

I’m all for the official website. As for implementing discoverability there, I’m not so sure, unless we can think of an awesome and novel way of doing the curation, that’ll really set it apart from the others.

[phinze]

You make a lot of good points. Let's bracket off the discoverability part and focus on a site with a killer introduction to our project first.

Straightforward, fast, no cruft... Dead-simple... Good-looking and informative

These are all descriptors I am 100% on board with!

[jamesaanderson]

I gave the landing page a shot:

What do you think of it?

[passcod]

Nice!

• The code areas look weird (big uneven padding) and not really styled; I assume that's a work in progress?
• The copy will need to be replaced, of course.
• Maybe make the column a bit smaller? Right now it will only look "filled" if there's a lot of content in the paragraphs or if we make the font bigger everywhere.

These are just nitpicks, though. It's a great way to (re)start this site!

edit:

• Question for/from the audience: do we want to look like http://brew.sh ? (Same colour scheme, fonts, etc?)

[jamesaanderson]

Thanks for the feedback.

[nanoxd]

#1349

[gregkare]

http://caskroom.io/ is live, so this one can be closed as well.