clutter on stan main page?

[Andrew Gelman]

Hi all. I like the Stan main page. Once we have some good demos, we can highlight them, but we don't have them yet, so that's fine. What I'm concerned about is the large number of tabs. I was looking for the examples and I couldn't find an examples tag. Eventually I found it under DOCS, which makes sense. I'm just wondering whether we should trim the number of tabs. I don't want drop-downs, I'm just thinking we could combine some existing tabs.

Currently:

Interfaces
Docs
Issues
Events
Community
Cite
Team
Develop
Shop
Support

Maybe we could merge Events and Team into the Community section?
Also maybe we could have a Help tab?

I dunno, I'm no expert here, I'm just concerned that if it's hard for me to find examples, it could be hard for other people to find examples too!

A

[Bob Carpenter]

Tradeoffs. If it's not on a tab, it'll be hard to find.
If it's buried under long scrolling it'll be hard to find.
Unless it's blinking at the top of the home page, it's going
to be hard to find.

May I suggest Google? We should probably add a search box
restricted to our site and served by Google.

One extreme: everything on one page. It's all there, no
guessing which tab it's under, but lots of scrolling.

Other extreme: fine grained pull-down tabs with informative
headers.

I watched Daniel struggle to find the users' group listing,
which is under the "community" tab, so that probably needs
a new label. I know where everything is because I took the
last pass at rearranging, so you want feedback from someone other
than me.

I could see merging the team into community, but it's not
unusual to call out the developers at the top level.

And "support" is confusing, becuase it's not tech support, it's
a plea to get other people to support Stan and calls out who's
supporting us already.

What do you want under a "Help" tab?

- Bob

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[Andrew Gelman]

I'm not sure, we can perhaps discuss at Stan mtg. I agree about the tradeoffs.

Let me now try to follow Dave Krantz's suggestion which is to suggest goals rather than solutions.

These are the items that I think should be most accessible (in order from most to less important):

Getting Started. (This is now not in a tab but it's on the main page which seems fine to me)
Users Manual, tutorials, and other documentation
Getting help by posting on the users group
Example models
Stan community

I like the general look of the site, so maybe it's just a matter of adding an Examples tab and a Users group tab, and getting rid of the Events and Develop and Team tabs (combining them with Community or something like that), and somehow combining Cite, Shop, Support in some clever way?

A

[Bob Carpenter]

>
> On Jun 8, 2016, at 4:44 PM, Andrew Gelman <gel...@stat.columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure, we can perhaps discuss at Stan mtg.

Add it to the agenda wiki. It's a classic bike shed issue, so
it should be fun.

> I agree about the tradeoffs.
>
> Let me now try to follow Dave Krantz's suggestion which is to suggest goals rather than solutions.

If you can suggest how to move the deck chairs, they're easy
to move---it's all in markdown and we can run Jekyll locally
so we don't disturb the live site. I can sit down and we can
do it together.

- Bob

[Avraham Adler]

How difficult would it be to create tool tips that pop up when hovering over the tab so one could "navigate" without having to click through?

Avi