Review Shields descriptions

[PyvesB]

We describe Shields in different ways in different places:

• on GitHub:

  Concise, consistent, and legible badges in SVG and raster format

• on Twitter:

  Quality metadata badges for open source projects.

• on OpenCollective:

  Concise, consistent, and legible badges… in a readme near you

• ...

Is there room for improvement or making things more consistent? Or are we happy with the current state of these headlines? Either way, I think there's value in having an informal discussion about how we communicate about what Shields is.

[paulmelnikow]

It'd be a great idea to land on a single tagline and use it everywhere.

Two more we use:

• the website title:

  Quality metadata badges for open source projects

• the website feature top line:

  Pixel-perfect, Retina-ready, Fast, Consistent, Hackable, No tracking

I thought I'd start things off by mentioning some of the things that I think are important about Shields.

1. We make readmes look consistent
2. Shields is easy to use. Our URLs are friendly, and we provide good documentation and great error messages.
3. Shields is a community project. We have 300+ contributors, 2k forks, and merge a lot of PRs. We have a good development environment that makes it easy to add badges for new services. We make an environment that's friendly for people to ask questions and make contributions.
4. It's really powerful. You can make your own static badges and make your own badges using custom endpoints.
5. We don't track you or your users.
6. It's fast and reliable. We have tests of all our badges and the daily tests catch problems before users report them.
7. While it's a service to the open-source community, it's also startup- and corporate-friendly. You can host your own instances that have secure access to private repos, and you can run it on a private network.

The tagline should be way shorter than that, though maybe it draws from some of these things!

[PyvesB]

Suggestion:

Metadata taken to the next level with quality badges generated by a powerful open-source project

[paulmelnikow]

I wonder, instead of "metadata" if we could use a phrase like "status" or "status at a glance."

[PyvesB]

I find the status/metadata words somewhat restrictive. Badges such as Twitter followers or Wheelmap don't naturally fall under these. Maybe:

Data at a glance with quality badges generated by a powerful open-source project.

Or:

Summarize the world with quality badges generated by a powerful open-source project.

[paulmelnikow]

Data at a glance

I like this ^^

It's nice not to describe it in a way that's overly restrictive, though I think we should probably convey that it's for developers.

Some ideas:

Community-powered informational badges for software developers

Community-powered informational badges for your software project

Informational badges for your software project, powered by the community

[calebcartwright]

All SGTM. I'd suggest technologists instead of software developers if we refer to an audience

[paulmelnikow]

Another idea is this fun + punchy tagline:

Home of the badges

I like that it conveys how well-established we are in this space!

We could add the descriptive bits in a paragraph or in some bullets that follows.

[calebcartwright]

Another idea is this fun + punchy tagline:

Home of the badges

I'm a big 👍 on that one

[PyvesB]

Slightly different wording:

Home of all things badges

[paulmelnikow]

Another variation:

Where badges get made

[paulmelnikow]

I like how fun Home of all things badges is. It definitely conveys a sense of humor. Though I think "things" and "badges" both being plural, it's a bit difficult to parse, and doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

Yet another idea:

All things badged

Might be my favorite yet. It's punchy, descriptive (yes, we are the kitchen-sink of badge services!), and very fun.

[PyvesB]

Yet another idea:

All things badged

I like it as well, however, I'm not used to seeing that word used as a verb, so it doesn't resonate with me as much.

Idea somewhat like a brand slogan:

Filling your Readmes with quality badges, since 2014.

[paulmelnikow]

Wanted to mention that an improvement to the description was suggested in #7129:

Add a main explanation/about section or page.

We get greeted with the shields.io icon, some key phrases like "Pixel-perfect" and "hackable" followed by a search box and categories.
A new user may get confused by this and a small text saying what the page is about would already help to prevent this initial confusion.
Something like the following would imo help to inform about what shields.io is about:

Shields.io offers pixel-perfect, scalable and hackable SVG badges to use in your website or project.
It is fast and easy to use, supports various pages and projects such as GitHub and is retina-ready.

[Andre601]

Wanted to mention that an improvement to the description was suggested in #7129:

Add a main explanation/about section or page.
We get greeted with the shields.io icon, some key phrases like "Pixel-perfect" and "hackable" followed by a search box and categories.
A new user may get confused by this and a small text saying what the page is about would already help to prevent this initial confusion.
Something like the following would imo help to inform about what shields.io is about:

Shields.io offers pixel-perfect, scalable and hackable SVG badges to use in your website or project.
It is fast and easy to use, supports various pages and projects such as GitHub and is retina-ready.

Thinking about this, I feel like the text I suggested should at most be used as a long description for the website itself, or in larger embeds (summary?).

For a simple tag-line could perhaps this be enough:

Free, open-source Badge generator for creating pixel-perfect SVG and Raster-format images to use everywhere you like!

Shares the key features (free, open-source and well formatted badges), what formats are supported (SVG and raster format) and that you can use it pretty much everywhere.