[Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal

[Tim van der Linden]

Hi all!

In the recent light of visual changes to the wiki, I have picked up an old(er) 
idea to have my go at a redesign of the homepage (landing page, front page, 
the-first-page, etc...).

I, for one, find our CHICKEN site charming. Yet many new folks see the homepage 
more as the scrolling end credits to CHICKEN The Movie then an actual 
eye-catching, easy to pick-up page. Too much text, no pleasing, eye stroking 
candy.

Do not understanding me wrong, I do not wish to push a Candy Crush, plastic, 
all bells & whistles design, yet I hope most of you agree that something needs 
to be done to attract new users (rather then to scare them away) and to try to 
get to information faster.

The first thing I did on this journey was to take a peek at our fellow language 
pages, and see what they do to reel them in. A quick glance at other languages 
(like Python, Racket (!), Ruby, Erlang, ...) show the following common features:

- See common, easy-to-understand code samples depicting typical language 
features
- Clear changelog timeline
- Visual weight (visual importance, not one blob of text)
- Big Download/Get Started now call-to-action

Things less commonly see, but just plain beautiful:

- The ability to run code in an interactive shell
- A map of CHICKEN across the world
- A list of real-life CHICKEN projects
- An awesome photo of chickens

For the design I thought it would be smart to give it a minimalistic 
approach...CHICKEN is a tiny language after all, and we want to tout it's 
simplicity, right?

Before putting in to much design work, I thought I would throw it out early in 
the process.
So I have gone ahead and create a (very rough) design for the homepage only, 
using flat elements and hopefully a better approach then currently is the case.
Mind that this is only a mock-up (nothing works!) and not all information is 
accurate. But it should give you a fairly good idea of the direction I wish to 
take...

Also...if there are any *real* designers in the house...any help is welcomed ;)

Find it here: http://shisaa.jp/chicken/

All input is greatly appreciated and I hope this will spark a few ideas here 
and there...

Cheers,
Tim