Redesign all HTML assets

[brson]

This includes rust-lang.org, the tutorials, guides, manuals and API docs.

I think most of us value the spare style on our home page, so we want to preserve that general aesthetic, though not that specific design. We need something attractive and consistent across all of our pages, that can be adapted to additional content as our needs grow. Some existing examples that we like are sinatra, node, homebrew.

Remember that Rust is a community project, and for engineers; the purpose of our web presence isn't to sell to managers; let's just present the facts cleanly.

This task probably also includes reevaluating what content is on the front page of rust-lang.org and rewriting it.

The web page should probably, like the above examples, tell you very simply how to install Rust, and point you at the docs and other resources, and not much else. Maybe a very brief elevator pitch.

[brson]

Nominating

[brson]

We'll probably contract this.

[alexcrichton]

cc #9868

[catamorphism]

1.0, high

[adrientetar]

@brson If I (or others here) can help further in getting this issue closed, I'd be glad to.
Do you have some precise design changes you'd want to make?

I have looked at your examples:

• Sinatra has too few content for Rust, I think we don't want that so not sure what we could take as inspiration there really. It has a clean design and I think that the Rust website is clean too.
• node.js, I think it looks good but at the cost of showing less information.
• Homebrew shows a sort of quick Get Started instructions, good to get started quickly but newcomers would probably rather want to have a short but explicative presentation of the language.

Looking at these as a whole, they all have a GitHub fork me banner (I have a PR for that BTW), they too have some quirks on small screen widths.
Anyways, if you have some precise design ideas please clarify them so that me or someone else here can sketch something new or discuss... because tbh I don't really see how we could use your examples (I do surely agree that they look good through!).

[Kimundi]

Something that should definitely change is that the git versions need to be emphasized as the recommend ones, as is it happens to often that the first thing people get told is that they should use the latest git if possible.

Put the git links on top, and make the releases link font smaller.

[brson]

Also need the design to extend to our package management and discovery interface (#10041)

[brson]

@adridu59 Here are the elements that I want:

• A Rust logo and the word Rust, possibly stylized and/or part of the logo.
• A single-paragraph elevator pitch that is honed to perfection.
• A very prominent one-liner script or download link, as appropriate for the detected OS that, with very little intervention, gives you a working Rust installation. This ties into Make binary installers for mac and linux #9876 and Upload nightly binary installer snapshots. #9877.
• A prominent link to the tutorial, which must be amazing (Rewrite the intro tutorial #9874).
• The minimum amount of additional links.
• Ample whitespace.

Here are some additional elements that may be important or desirable.

• A tagline along the lines of the existing 'a safe, concurrent, practical language'.
• An example like that on the nodejs page that shows you how to write something simple and invoke the compiler to run it.

[adrientetar]

@brson I have some ideas... I'll work on that.

PS: some other examples I like:

• Scala
• Golo
• Erlang
• Opa Framework

Overall, I found that very few languages have really good websites... should make it easier for Rust. ;)

[adrientetar]

@brson I have implemented OS detection based on what Firefox uses. For the general layout, are you ok with a navbar? I was thinking of maybe something dynamic like Ace.

[thehydroimpulse]

@brson I've been taking a hack at getting some new designs with some good folks on the IRC. https://github.com/TheHydroImpulse/rust-website

[brson]

Nominating for removal from milestone. I think that with the impending incremental tweaks to our docs that a complete redesign is no longer critical for 1.0.

[pnkfelix]

removing from 1.0 milestone. Recategorizing as P-low (we can live with what we have).

[brson]

Closing this wishlist item.