Improving the homepage

[Simon Ruderich]

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Hi,

as a new user to macports I have some possible improvements for the
homepage because the first visit to it was a bit confusing:

As I first visited the homepage I couldn't find any information what
macports is; only after digging in the links I found out. I knew already
what it is but new users should get a quick overview. So I suggest an
introduction sentence like "macports is a project which allows you to
run different unix software on your mac very easily" or something
similar at the index page.

I also think the links should be better categorized. The first link
should be "Getting started" which links to a real introduction how to
setup macports (for starters and also for programmers), with a good
example like Gimp or OpenOffice.

What irritated me was that some links point to macports.org (like
contact or news) and others to macosforge.org (like subversion) and
there was no easy way back to macports. I think these links should be
moved to an own section like "external help" or so.

Also the links change when you access the trac "part" of the page. I
think all pages should have the same links section.

There should also a quick access to the documentation. At first I
couldn't find a good documentation at all; only some files in the trac
wiki which wasn't so good. Only after digging in the svn repository I
found the DocBook guide which is really good. I think it should be
compiled and stored on the page, preferably as a link in the "Getting
started" link system. But maybe I'm just missing a link which I didn't find.

What is also missing is a good quick start introduction. The DocBook
manual is very detailed but too confusing (and too long) for new users,
so we should create a small page with all necessary information to use
macports.

There are also old links to the darwinports which looks like it's not
accessible anymore. These should be removed too.


I very much like the macports system and will working with it regularly
in the future but I think by improving the webpage it could be made much
more easily for starters to get macports working and preventing them
from giving up, which was what I did after visiting the page some months
ago.

If you allow patches or other ways to improve the webpage I would very
much like to help you with this because I think macports is a very good
system for every mac user. I'm not so a good (Objective-) C programmer
but I think I know enough about web applications to help you there.

If anybody has other ideas or improvements or critics on my ideas I
would like to discuss it here to get a better macports page.

Thanks for your great affords with macports and all your answers on this
topics,
Simon
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