The beta.rust-lang.org PR debacle

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I'm in agreement that the beta website has a very bad design.

Design issues

  • The colors chosen for the color scheme clash badly with each other. They're very inconsistent, dissonant choices.
  • There are 6 different colors in use on each page, which is an incredibly risky design choice that has never panned out well in practice. Designers should limit themselves to 3 primary color choices per page. The nim-language website is a great example of following this design rule. The rocket.rs is another good example. To no surprise, most professional websites, posters, even national flags adhere to this rule.
  • Never overlap three different colors with text. This makes the headers very hard to read, especially if you have any kind of reading disability, or color blindness.
  • The font for the headers are too large, too bold, too wide. The kerning also seems to be way off on the font choice. This actually makes them harder to read, and consumes space that could otherwise be spent on fitting more critical content on the screen.
  • Excessive padding between elements, which leads to an increased need to scroll. This increases the likelihood of visitors leaving the page, because the website is communicating style more than content.
  • Due to the padding and excessive font sizes, the website is effectively unusable on mobile devices.
  • Never use yellow text on black. It doesn't work well at all. This doesn't work well unless the text is larger, with a medium to bold font size, and the website is dedicated to that as the color scheme.

Content issues

  • The wording is sensationalistic in various parts, which makes the website seem oriented more towards a corporate-speak audience, rather than the technical one that is the actual target. This can actually turn a lot of technically-minded folks away.
  • The lack of source code on the front page is... concerning. A simple generic example that demonstrates many of Rust's more interesting syntax futures goes a long way in enticing a deeper look into the language.
  • Studies show that most programmers learn best when they have examples to learn from. By not including source code on the front page, programmers will no longer get an insight as to why Rust's syntax is a better choice over another language from a first perspective. This is why it's important that every crate displays examples within their README.md and crate documentation.
  • I'm baffled at why some of the most important content has been relegated to tiny links in the footer.
  • The testimonials are out of place, and to be perfectly honest, increases the-shady-as-hell marketing by a magnitude. They don't add any value to the pitch for Rust.
  • The front page could use some content to better explain why Rust should be chosen over another language. Why is it performant? Why is it reliable? Why is it productive? Why does this make Rust a better choice? What does it offer than we can't already do?
  • It describes some things that you can do in Rust, but truth be told, these things apply to most other popular programming languages as well, so I don't feel that this truly communicates anything unique about Rust. This merely describes that Rust can be used for the same tasks that other languages are capable of.
  • Perhaps the best feature that Rust has for CLI applications is the Clap crate, but the CLI page does nothing to demonstrate how powerful Rust can be with a CLI built around it.
  • Networking makes no mention of the Actix web framework, which is built on top of tokio, and thus async I/O. Rocket does not support async I/O and is much slower as a result. Furthermore, Rocket does not build on a stable compiler, so it's very misleading to showcase it.

Personal nitpicks

  • When I first visited the original Rust website, the code example is the first thing that stood out, enticing me to give it a deeper look. With the beta, very little stands out to me, personally, to give Rust a try. It looks like an ad for hyped Node.js web framework.
  • The lack of a Documentation link is a bad thing. Learning and documentation are two entirely different things. Documentation is what an already-learned person refers to when they need to reference some specific details.
  • The Learn and Documentation should be split into two separate pages. Learn should be dedicated to books and tutorials.
  • I feel like there's a lot of wasted potential here. There's a lot of great resources in the Rust community that should be displayed front and center, but they get zero mentions on the website, or even the front page. The official book, Docs.rs, Crates.io, etc. These should be on the front page.

As it is now, the current website is superior to the beta website.

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