I'm going to be brutally honest here, but don't worry I'm not a connoisseur of these things! I'm actually probably close to your target audience.
I've been using git as a single developer in a very timid way for years. This is my public repo https://github.com/marshray . I know how to 'add' and 'commit -m ...' and 'push'. Anything else I usually have to look up. Just yesterday I actively collaborated for the first time and did a fastforward pull and a merge a few times. Scared me to death I was going to screw something up because we had a hard deadline.
When I followed the link on HN, I didn't know what it was. I thought you might be starting a GitHub competitor service. It's a pretty design, but the first two paragraphs I skimmed over. I already know what git is or I wouldn't be on the site. I actually know quite a bit about how git compares to those other products because I've used most of them. But the graph with the stack of books on the right reminds me "gee I know exactly how to do that in Perforce, I wish it would just sink in how to do it with git. The branch diagrams still look like Feynman diagrams to me and I don't know quantum physics".
I saw the 'About, Documentation, Downloads, Community'. All very obvious categorizations, but here's was my first impression:
About - yes I've figured out by now this is a website about git, and already know what git is about
Downloads - I've never downloaded git except via a package manager so this is probably not useful to me
Documentation - ok that could be helpful, but I have no sense at this point if it's any good. You know a lot of sites amount to mostly just manpages.
Community get involved! - I'm not so invested in git that I would want to join a list about it. I feel grateful for the community because when I have questions a web search usually turns up an appropriate discussion. But usually it's a blog post or stack overflow. I don't recall a mailing list or a forum post being helpful, but probably it has and I've just forgotten.
I saw the picture of the book. "Oh yes, the black and yellow publisher" I thought. Its bold colors visually dominated everything else on the page. I suspected that the site may be a guy who wrote a book on git and this is his personal site.
I saw all the list of logos of companies using git and thought "I wonder if he got permission for all of those, wow that must have taken a lot of emails". But that's just how my mind works.
At this point I closed the page, not having any pressing need to interact or explore the site.
I totally didn't notice the Mac on the right hand side.
I read the HN discussion a little bit. Mostly I found myself replying to the guy who said the slogan (which I didn't even notice) was reinforcing gender stereotypes. Reading a few more comments it starts to dawn on me: "OH! This is that same git-scm site I think I've been to before. The one that had the good manual on how to use git in some practical situations..." I remembered it fondly, though not very clearly because I wasn't a very frequent visitor.
I see someone mention in an HN comment that a Mac appears when Javascript is disabled. I had totally tuned it out before but now it looks ridiculous. Why in the world would the primary choice be to download for Mac? Why would the only other platform download be for Windows? (But it's good to know there may be a supported option for Windows if I ever need it.)
To explore further, I click on 'Documentation' as it's the only link that remotely seems like something useful to my forseeable needs. My eyes go to the picture of the book "Reference manual" OK there's the printout of the man pages I guess. Scanning down I see "Getting started, Git basics, ... yawn standard stuff"
For some reason, I scroll down a bit. WOW! brightly colored business cards! "Git Basics What is version control?" The title seems useless, but I'm more focused on trying to figure out what these very visually distinctive rectangles are doing below the fold on a table of contents. OH WOW these are Videos! Earlier today I'd had a passing thought about watching some video on git when I was at O'Reilly's site for DRM-free day. They'd had a 6 hour video you could download for $40 or something. That wasn't in my price range, but these videos could be worth watching.
So sorry if I didn't pick up on the visual appeal of your redesign, but I hope my best effort at describing the state of my mind in retrospect will be helpful to you or others in your web design endeavors.
I'll be equally brutally honest here: as a software professional, craftsman, hacker, or even hobbyist, there is a minimum amount of intellectual effort required for mastery of your toolkit.
> At this point I closed the page, not having any pressing need to interact or explore the site.
IMHO, the single most valuable asset of a creative mind is curiosity.
[p.s. HN: don't read anything into the order of that list .. :)]
> IMHO, the single most valuable asset of a creative mind is curiosity.
All the minds curious enough to explore exhaustively every new website have been pruned out of the reproduction pool since the 2000s. They still haunt some websites, but the only one left are now those able to form an arbitrary judgement of the value of a website from its homepage.
* Git is not part of my main-line toolkit. I just dabble in it. (out of curiosity!)
* I have limited time and energy to pursue my curiosity. My goal is to focus that on a manageable number of things. Writing fun code projects is my primary goal, git is a means to that end. Since this is mostly solo coding, I don't often have the need for the advanced distributed features.
* I visted the site from a link on HN on a Friday evening, not as someone seeking information about git.
I think the branch diagrams not making sense is the core of your problems becoming fluent with git. You need to understand what a graph is, and specifically what a directed acyclic graph is. That's all there is to it.
Each vertex is a snapshot of the git-tracked contents of your project; each edge is a patch (or could be a collection of patches in the case of a merge).
A branch name is a pointer, always to the most recent node (commit) on the branch.
A tag name is a pointer to any node (commit) at all, not updated after a commit like a branch pointer is.
The common git commands (rebase, merge, etc.) should be easy to grasp and use given that basic knowledge.
I know and love graphs, including DAGs, and even sometime write C++ to operate upon them using boost::graph or my own representation.
I'm sure I can learn git, just as a casual user (we use P4 at my day job) I just haven't put in the time to learn about its branching and merging system, or had much occasion to practice it. I was hoping I would just absorb it magically, but git is using a lot of its own terminology and it's just doing something differently that I just don't feel like I know what I'm doing yet.
Man, that is a painful criticism. I applaud those that created git, those that maintain it, and those that document it. I know you meant all of this in a good way to help them get their site in order, but even if the new site is unreadable, I'll drink a beer to git anyday. Cheers.
To be clear I was definitely left with a positive impression of the site and even a desire to return to it. I didn't go as far as bookmarking it, but I expect to return via web search to some of the great content (that I'm sure is there) that I didn't drill down into.
I'm just trying to document my thought processes as a website visitor accurately.
>I see someone mention in an HN comment that a Mac appears when Javascript is disabled. I had totally tuned it out before but now it looks ridiculous. Why in the world would the primary choice be to download for Mac?
Because Mac has 10% share (US at least), Linux has around 1%, so most Git users use Macs, thus it would make sense to use it? In programmer conferences, for example, from Ruby, to R, to Scala to Python, most people come with Apple laptops. In campuses, it's even worse (or better, depending on how you see things.
Last but not least, even the creator of Linux and Git himself, uses a Mac (albeit with Linux loaded).
>Why would the only other platform download be for Windows?
Maybe because Windows has like 90% market share, and because Git was historically not well supported on the platform they want to attract users to it?
As for why no Linux download, well, because Linux users get it from their distro.
(Discl: I use Linux (Ubuntu LTS) for servers and OS X for my desktop. Cut my teach on Sun OS in the nineties).
>Those market shares - both among the general population and among developers, which are themselves very different - are completely irrelevant. The share that matters here is mostly among "developers using NoScript". I wouldn't be surprised in the least to know that Linux has that share.
I thought he was making the general case, why a Mac picture at all as a choice, not why show a Mac specifically for the noscript.
If he means the latter, then, well, it doesn't matter at all. It's not like more than 0.1% of people visiting the page will see the noscript version --and it's not like anywhere should even care about what they will see.
It's not like more than 0.1% of people visiting the page will see the noscript version
What makes you say this? Of the folks I know who might like to use a site about git, most of them use Firefox with Noscript. I'm sure my sample is biased, but I don't think you can assume it will never be more than 0.1%.
I've been using git as a single developer in a very timid way for years. This is my public repo https://github.com/marshray . I know how to 'add' and 'commit -m ...' and 'push'. Anything else I usually have to look up. Just yesterday I actively collaborated for the first time and did a fastforward pull and a merge a few times. Scared me to death I was going to screw something up because we had a hard deadline.
When I followed the link on HN, I didn't know what it was. I thought you might be starting a GitHub competitor service. It's a pretty design, but the first two paragraphs I skimmed over. I already know what git is or I wouldn't be on the site. I actually know quite a bit about how git compares to those other products because I've used most of them. But the graph with the stack of books on the right reminds me "gee I know exactly how to do that in Perforce, I wish it would just sink in how to do it with git. The branch diagrams still look like Feynman diagrams to me and I don't know quantum physics".
I saw the 'About, Documentation, Downloads, Community'. All very obvious categorizations, but here's was my first impression:
About - yes I've figured out by now this is a website about git, and already know what git is about
Downloads - I've never downloaded git except via a package manager so this is probably not useful to me
Documentation - ok that could be helpful, but I have no sense at this point if it's any good. You know a lot of sites amount to mostly just manpages.
Community get involved! - I'm not so invested in git that I would want to join a list about it. I feel grateful for the community because when I have questions a web search usually turns up an appropriate discussion. But usually it's a blog post or stack overflow. I don't recall a mailing list or a forum post being helpful, but probably it has and I've just forgotten.
I saw the picture of the book. "Oh yes, the black and yellow publisher" I thought. Its bold colors visually dominated everything else on the page. I suspected that the site may be a guy who wrote a book on git and this is his personal site.
I saw all the list of logos of companies using git and thought "I wonder if he got permission for all of those, wow that must have taken a lot of emails". But that's just how my mind works.
At this point I closed the page, not having any pressing need to interact or explore the site.
I totally didn't notice the Mac on the right hand side.
I read the HN discussion a little bit. Mostly I found myself replying to the guy who said the slogan (which I didn't even notice) was reinforcing gender stereotypes. Reading a few more comments it starts to dawn on me: "OH! This is that same git-scm site I think I've been to before. The one that had the good manual on how to use git in some practical situations..." I remembered it fondly, though not very clearly because I wasn't a very frequent visitor.
I see someone mention in an HN comment that a Mac appears when Javascript is disabled. I had totally tuned it out before but now it looks ridiculous. Why in the world would the primary choice be to download for Mac? Why would the only other platform download be for Windows? (But it's good to know there may be a supported option for Windows if I ever need it.)
To explore further, I click on 'Documentation' as it's the only link that remotely seems like something useful to my forseeable needs. My eyes go to the picture of the book "Reference manual" OK there's the printout of the man pages I guess. Scanning down I see "Getting started, Git basics, ... yawn standard stuff"
For some reason, I scroll down a bit. WOW! brightly colored business cards! "Git Basics What is version control?" The title seems useless, but I'm more focused on trying to figure out what these very visually distinctive rectangles are doing below the fold on a table of contents. OH WOW these are Videos! Earlier today I'd had a passing thought about watching some video on git when I was at O'Reilly's site for DRM-free day. They'd had a 6 hour video you could download for $40 or something. That wasn't in my price range, but these videos could be worth watching.
So sorry if I didn't pick up on the visual appeal of your redesign, but I hope my best effort at describing the state of my mind in retrospect will be helpful to you or others in your web design endeavors.