Four major themes to this work:
* Performance. This new site is fast. It loads considerably faster, especially on mobile.
Every pixel is drawn exactly once. Clicking around doesn't result in things jiggling everywhere.
* Navigation. I wanted to make it easier to get around the site, especially on mobile. To that end, we now have:
- Sticky navigation elements. The top nav bar, the left sidebar and the right TOC are now sticky and remain
on screen even as page content is scrolled.
- Tabs in the Docs section have been removed and integrated as accordion items in the left sidebar.
* Layout. I moved a bit of content around to make it easier to find and give us some room to grow:
- The Help page is now replaced with a full Help section. This provides a home for the FAQ, glossary,
bug reporting, and troubleshooting pages.
- The About page is now replaced with a full About section. This provides a home for the release notes, roadmap, upcoming "in the news" section, etc.
* Design. I tried to improve consistency across the site and provide a slightly lighter feel by minimizing the impact of some design elements. Specifics:
- Font sizes are now consistent across the site.
- The site does a much better job at adjusting to different screen sizes which makes the mobile experience better.
- Accessibility is improved by adding many attributes for screen readers, and by ensuring the site scales properly based on user-selected fonts.
This finally gives a home to oddball things like the FAQ, Glossary,
Release notes, and Contributing to the Docs stuff.
Took the opportunity to do a bit of tidying up in the directory structure
of the site by removing useless subdirectories.
- Remove unreferenced files
- Stop using sitemap_exclude in front matter since nothing is looking at this.
- Minify the javascript files for faster loading.
- Cleanup and add favicons
- Fill some of the app manifests for Android and Windows to integrate more nicely.
- Address a few Lighthouse auditing issues.
- The FAQ page now has categories to make the page more scalable.
- Removed the FAQ pages that were added a little while ago and integrate
their content into the main site FAQ page.
- Stop computing sitemap.xml since there's a Jekyll plugin that does that
for us.
Martin Taillefer