The new web site has me worried

[Joachim Wester]

I've been in the habit of pointing friends and colleagues to the Polymer project since the early Toolkitchen days. My experience has been that have been wowed, amazed and thrilled and many of them are active advocates of the technology today.  I had an equal experience since the early days of Angular.

However, this all stopped working a few weeks back. When I point them to http://www.polymer-project.org they come back confused. This is my accumulated synopsis of their feedback:

• Polymer is a framework supporting "the latest web technologies" that uses something called "bower" to download "elements that are a glimpse in our collective communities eyes" that works "across desktop and mobile" that work with "encapsulation". But hey, Joachim, what does it do?
  

The point is that you've forgotten to bring the initial gist to greet the visitor. The message is hidden deep in the mountains. The first scroll gist is what made Angular page work and it is what captures the audience in Eric Bidelmans slide deck.

The gist that makes my heart pump faster should start on the first scroll of the first page and continue at least one level down in your site map.

1. <pie-chart slices="10,20,70"><pie-chart> (Wow, got it)
   
2. <input value={{name}}/> (Hey, I like mustaches)
3. What is that bouncing thing? Web animations this easy? Cool
   
4. Unbelievable, I can create the <my-racecar> tag without even relying on a framework
   
5. Ready made tags! Now we are talking. Please I want this!!!
   

Now the message is hidden deep into the mountains and the visitor learn that "everything is an element"  and what package manager you choose (and why) even before she even grasped that Polymer relates to HTML (remove the single four letters on the first scroll hinting at this and we could equally well be talking about server side array elements). 

You are long over the initial excitement but the new visitor just started to glare at the first scroll of your site. You have taken the next step of wanting to show that encapsulation works on larger components than the user interface widget but the visitor does not even know that she can have a superbutton at this point.

Redo the order of engagement because your technology deserves it and let Eric spend some time to translate his presentation skills to the top of your site map.

[Joachim Wester]

Reading my own post, I want to point out that I love your move to bower and that I do agree that encapsulations is the most important virtue of component based architectures. This is of course, not my point. The point is purely related the web. The product is fantastic.

[Joachim Wester]

The 2011 presentation of MDV by Rafael Weinstein was also to the point. Now, the {{binding}} stuff is well hidden if you're not looking for it.

[Addy Osmani]

Thanks for the detailed feedback. 

We're looking at how we can better improve the messaging on the site and Eric has definitely been heavily involved in helping us craft what we have so far. Something the homepage currently lacks is a set of examples that really bring home the set of features that get developers excited about Polymer. We're working on a code concepts carousel / area that can highlight this so it's visible before you dive into the rest of the site.

This would (I believe) also solve the lack of coverage of features like data binding earlier on in the experience.

[Eric Bidelman]

Joachim, I couldn't agree more. The homepage needs a value proposition. It's currently buried a bit in subpages. Also, not many people understand (yet) the value and features that web components unlocks. 

Addy mentioned, we're hoping to get up some code up on the homepage to help tell that story. Stay tuned!

Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Polymer" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to polymer-dev...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/polymer-dev/61ab09e5-d67f-4ac4-a2e8-893b5a13018d%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Martin Kleinschrodt]

I rather like the 'For the impatient' part on the Enyo website: http://enyojs.com/about/

A quick and simple example is usually the best way to communicate the value proposition of a framework. By contrast, the landing page is rather generic and inexpressive. I say put a quick example right on the landing page. That way you probably have the biggest change of catching a developers attention, especially if the framework is as unique as Polymer.

Oh, and please don't use a carousel! http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/