mojombo/jekyll — pull request #583 by cobyism (2012-06-22 10:59:13+00:00)
Title: Jekyll Site Redesign

I'm working on a redesign of the main [Jekyll project site](http://jekyllrb.com), so I thought I'd kick of a pull-request for this nice and early to start collecting feedback.

Here's a screenshot of the initial direction:
![](https://github-images.s3.amazonaws.com/skitch/jekyll-20120622-203828.jpg)

@mojombo I know you already mentioned that you weren't completely sold on the cursive font for the header, but I haven't got around to playing with other options for it just yet.

The current description of Jekyll that seems to be used in most places is that it is a "simple, blog-aware, static site generator" so I thought it would make sense to elaborate on those three aspects as their own brief headings/paragraphs on the homepage—thus the headings in the screenshot: Simple, Blog-aware, and Static. The copy for these paragraphs aren't visually even in length yet, but my goal is to have them be three equally short, punchy, and clear descriptions of what it is exactly that Jekyll is.

Further down the page, I'd like to include a section explaining the whole "Free hosting using GitHub Pages" concept, how people can use Jekyll for their new site and mention that it's the engine behind Pages and so forth.

Then, toward the bottom of the page, I imagine having a prominent invitation for people to take—such as continuing on to the docs, or going to a separate page of the site with clear instructions for installation/setup and maybe even a blankslate folder structure to get them started (with template/layout files and so forth). I'm aware that one of the design goals of Jekyll is that the file structure is reasonably loose—however it might be worth considering having a starter structure for people to get up and running quickly. I'd love to get some input into whether this is a silly idea or not.

There's obviously a lot more work to go into this, as I'm still at the stage of working out what information the landing page needs to have and the best way to explain it all—so all suggestions and feedback welcome!