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na85

>well executed

IMHO the execution could be better. Doesn't render properly on my Nexus 5.

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Compared to what was there before, it's much better.

Website snapshot from October 13th:

http://web.archive.org/web/20151013161308/http://www.gnu.org...

I'm going to disagree with most of the others here and say that I definitely do prefer the look of the old site. The simple, clear paragraphs of text give me a feeling of "take your time, relax and learn; there's plenty of interesting things to read here." In contrast, the new site feels like in-your-face flashy distracting "TRY OUR AMAZING PRODUCT NOW!!" marketing, which just evokes a visceral "go away, leave me alone" reaction not unlike that I experience from seeing ads.

In addition, I had to scroll far more in the new site to read everything than the old one. For being basically decorative, those pictures are huge.

Maybe I'm just broken, but lots of paragraphs scares me off. The new site breaks everything down by section, and that makes it much less intimidating for me to skim and even read fully.

In comparison to the new site the first sentence on the old one throws me off:

     Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, the
     official extension language for the GNU operating system.

Oh, so it is a language for writing plugins in. Kinda cool, but Python seems more newbie friendly than scheme for the same purpose. Might have a niche for some more scientific applications...

Compared to the new site:

    Guile is designed to help programmers create flexible applications that can
    be extended by users or other programmers with plug-ins, modules, or
    scripts.

That sounds much more general purpose. Maybe you would write the whole application in guile not just part of it.

Exactly.

All those pictures and all that whitespace serves a purpose: it breaks up the message into manageable chunks that are easier to digest and more approachable.

The homepage of any project is essentially an ad for the project. It needs to be at least somewhat attention-grabbing: it's a brochure. People tune out when presented with big walls of text.

I'd hardly call the new site 'flashy' though: it tries to tell a story and make you care about the project. For better or worse, the new site does a better job at advertising the language than the old site did: somebody who's not already familiar with 'Guile' is more likely to actually spend time on the new site, whereas confronted with the wall of text that they have to read are likely just to tune out and close the tab.

That's advertising, and, like it or not, it works.

Yeah, I know exactly what it looked like: big wall of text with navigation. The sites for Python, Haskell, Ruby, O'Caml &c., all underwent similar changes, and all promote the languages better for that reason.

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