Yeah, love this! I hate when I can't figure out what a software or service does from their homepage.
Looking at oxide.computer... man... what DO they do? Do they sell servers?
My other pet peeve for these kind of websites is when the landing page is full of just release notes and links to tangentially related articles news articles and talks about the product, and it takes me 10 minutes to figure out where I can actually read about what the heck product I'm even looking at, and why I would use it over other products in its class.
This XKCD about uni websites gives the general gist of what I'm talking about https://xkcd.com/773/
Some Github repos are also awful. The README should summarize what the product is or link to a website that does.
It's hard to find some really terrible ones right now...
Apache products tend to take some effort to decipher what it is they even do or how they'd be used. They have a nice summary description like the start of a man page, but that's about it.
https://ant.apache.org/https://hadoop.apache.org/
The GitHub landing page is surprisingly worse than you'd expect. It's not terrible... but check it out in Incognito / Private Window and imagine you'd never heard of GitHub:
https://github.com/
Compare the above, with how cleanly and clearly Travis-CI manages to express what it does, and why you would use them, along with a useful screenshot of what the UI looks like right near the top of the page, so you can get an idea of what it would be like to use in practice:
https://travis-ci.org/
Looking at oxide.computer... man... what DO they do? Do they sell servers?
My other pet peeve for these kind of websites is when the landing page is full of just release notes and links to tangentially related articles news articles and talks about the product, and it takes me 10 minutes to figure out where I can actually read about what the heck product I'm even looking at, and why I would use it over other products in its class.
This XKCD about uni websites gives the general gist of what I'm talking about https://xkcd.com/773/
Some Github repos are also awful. The README should summarize what the product is or link to a website that does.
The Kotlin and Elm websites are pretty good: https://kotlinlang.org/ https://elm-lang.org/
It's hard to find some really terrible ones right now...
Apache products tend to take some effort to decipher what it is they even do or how they'd be used. They have a nice summary description like the start of a man page, but that's about it. https://ant.apache.org/ https://hadoop.apache.org/
The GitHub landing page is surprisingly worse than you'd expect. It's not terrible... but check it out in Incognito / Private Window and imagine you'd never heard of GitHub: https://github.com/
Compare the above, with how cleanly and clearly Travis-CI manages to express what it does, and why you would use them, along with a useful screenshot of what the UI looks like right near the top of the page, so you can get an idea of what it would be like to use in practice: https://travis-ci.org/