Hey
Beautiful work!
I like the two large logo symbols in the background of the screenshot at the top, they add nice color to the page.
I’ll go through the user feedback (What are your favorite things about RawTherapee?) and return a few points.
As a user I get quite fed up with shitty program descriptions on F-Droid, Play Store and on software websites, descriptions more akin to someone trying to up-sell their shitty program for $$$ instead of being the honest and insightful info I’d expect from an open-source project which has nothing to gain from marketing and lies. As such, we should also mention the target audience in this prominent section, so that it’s clear what RawTherapee does not do and who it’s not for, so that people looking for a program don’t waste their and our time by installing software that lacks features essential to them, and filing issues for features which won’t get implemented. Our README.md already covers this, though it does not need to be copied verbatim.
Agreed, and only the release note-type posts.
We’ll only be publishing news, mostly release announcements (consisting of release notes + screenshots + perhaps demo video). There will be no blogging.
I would like the new website to keep things simple and avoid sub-pages unless necessary.
The way it is now, with the short “About” section at the top, is good. If we want to mention the history of the project, then there could be a “History” section at the bottom, or a sub-page, containing a summary of this and this (but with places of residence stripped, and with other info stripped and summarized as necessary).
It’s hosted on a Hungarian server paid for by Gabor. There have been numerous issues with the server in the past, so it might be a good idea to switch. I am contacting Gabor about this now.
Yes, the lack of gap makes me uneasy.
On my calibrated + profiled screen it looks nice but I agree a little too contrasty from the actual text. Maybe change #1a88ff to something around #4ea3ff.
Interesting, could you link to them?
No! No more external bundling of AboutThisBuild.txt. Is it scary nonsense to users and a source of many headaches to me, as (unknown to probably anyone on the dev team) there were frequent issues with these files which required re-writing the info manually. It’s a relic from the past when there were long gaps between releases and I would upload various dev builds from various people. That won’t be happening anymore - now we have frequent releases, and builds are mostly generated automatically. To be clear, the builds themselves (EXE or MSI, AppImage, DMG, etc.) can still include AboutThisBuild.txt internally, but we should no longer ship this file outside of the builds themselves as we do now.
Let’s just have a simple download section as it is on the new site now, and in a “Download Older Versions” section the downloads should be grouped by version (not the way it is on our current downloads page), so e.g. a “5.5” section would have a button for Windows, macOS and Linux.
The download buttons for the latest release should be prominent. Two small hyperlinks in a less-prominent place (under the latest release) should link to automated dev builds, and to a page with older versions. Windows and AppImage automated dev builds: https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/releases/tag/nightly We will need to work something out with @HIRAM who makes macOS builds manually.
Not sure a dedicated Features page will pay off in the long term. The sections with large images on the main page are the most prominent features. Dedicated “features” pages quickly become outdated. There is one place which lists all features, in detail, and should be always up to date, and that is RawPedia. A Features page should not list things like noise removal, color toning or sharpening because these are all tools (I just updated and greatly simplified the Features page), and all tools are clearly visible on the RawPedia main page. Better to spend time polishing RawPedia than duplicate the effort on the website.