If there’s anything that is slowing Meteor adoption, it’s the new website.
I used to visit the website all the time to find resources and look at various things. Now it’s far too cluttered and ugly to even bother with.
5 Likes
I can see where you’re coming from. This particular section seems pretty useless and wouldn’t make sense to people not familiar with Meteor.
Then again MDG has the analytics data, we don’t. They must have A/B tested their landing page.
1 Like
Can you give a few examples of what you find cluttered and ugly? What information are you looking for that you can’t find? Any examples you can provide will likely help. MDG pays close attention to constructive criticism through these forums.
2 Likes
Agree 100%!! I think the best way to assist MDG is to provide actionable insights, like any startup they are spinning a lot of plates and need the community to support them in every area.
4 Likes
We’re working on improving the website!
10 Likes
Cool stuff, mo’ Meteor devs mo’ Meteor sites!
1 Like
Cheers @hwillson, this type of feedback is exactly what we need. The more specific the use cases and examples the faster we can act to resolve issues.
As @sashko mentioned, we’re currently working to streamline the website. The areas of focus are developer content, showcasing apps, and better presenting the benefits of Meteor.
4 Likes
So, since we’re in this space - what’s happened to the 7 meteor principles? They seem to have disappeared from the site.
2 Likes
They got condensed here: http://guide.meteor.com/#what-is-meteor
I think having too many principles made it hard to be flexible in the changing landscape of JS development. For example, “database everywhere” is not as revelant with something like Apollo. And “simplicity equals productivity” wasn’t actually being embodied by the framework IMO because it turned out that productivity was often enabled by lots of complexity under the hood.
4 Likes
7 principles down to 4 - not bad, but I think we can get it down to 1:
- Meteor makes developers happy, which makes customers, clients and the general public happy, which makes the Internet happy (excluding Reddit).
13 Likes
I’m thinking more along the lines of the cluttered array of navigation and dropdowns. There’s so many ins and outs to the website, it overwhelms me.
I just want something simple. I want to be able to find what I’m looking for in seconds.
float: left navigation should look like this: Logo Features Documentation Pricing
float: right navigation should look like this: Forums Blog About Sign-in
And screw the bootstrap. Bootstrap is noobish.
No dropdowns. Dropdowns kill retention.
No clutter. Clutter overwhelms possible users.
No long worded links. People think word by word.
Also, the new color is depressing. I’m sure the Percolate crew is fixing up a new and awesome website though. They got Atmosphere spot on.
1 Like
The biggest problem I have is going from the forums to the main site, we have to type in the url address again.
2 Likes
This part: 
is REALLY confusing, I mean, where should I go? tutorial? docs?? guide???
3 Likes
Sure, they got that part right. But that’s the only part they got right.
You know you’re approaching complexity when you have two header nav bars, and every link on the second one is a dropdown.
Make. It. Simple.
1 Like
From a design standpoint, not an architecture/application standpoint.
2 Likes
Honestly it’s not as bad as I was expecting but there sure is a lot of trendy stuff here and no dark mode…
I really don’t get why it strayed so far from the genesis of meteor. It used to be a utility based design and very functional without all this trendy icons and ‘learn to code’ kaka
It’s good people can speak their minds now and the moderators are not on a power mad ban spree, if I had posted this only a year ago I would of got banned for sure. Nice work boys. Protect the first amendment, protect GNUGPL
3 Likes
Check out supabase.com - they are making all the important points in a nice way
Current Meteor website is prob trying to sell to executives but they have failed at that strategy
Not a single code sample anywhere - they are not talking to developers at all
3 Likes
Good points and thanks for sharing, can defo confirm because 1. I am an executive (CTO) and 2. I am also a developer.
I represent a US based VC fund that is veteran owned, donates to charities and loves open source endeavours.
This needs to go back to the grass roots it came from. No one should have crippling student debt to learn the very tools that gave us our freedom and ability to learn off our own hardwork and initative. Thats why GNUGPL exists.
Not a single code sample anywhere - they are not talking to developers at all
This is the most crucial point. It’s become asinine and useless. A prime example of poor management and echo chamber decision making. Let’s fix it! FORK FORK FORK
Another CTO/Head of Tech chiming in. What @truedon says.
By the way I am the most sad to not have “the book” anymore. This was groundbreakingly great at the time. From zero to meteor with a near-perfect feedback-loop in a hands-on way. (Loading interface... u remember this?).
Nowadays devs need to be catched where they are: truly novice (blaze+JS it is), advanced (probably react+typescript) or “ahead of the curve” (don’t know a better name) that use stuff like svelte+tailwind. So, roughly 3 flavors of the same thing would be needed, targeted at the high amount of frontend-first devs out there aiming to give them fullstack superpowers with meteor.
Another way would be for the backend guys, where you show them how easy it is to quickly achieve stuff with mongo/ddp and just slap on some component ui library like bootstrap that looks decent enough without effort, so that interactive visual tools are nearly as easy to build as a CLI with formatted console.log() stuff. Maybe even add some mongo aggregation pipeline + charting to the mix here, so that common backend dev tasks look as effortless as they are with meteor!
Just my ideas for that - but I really believe the getting interested->onboarding story is the crucial thing to get a growth trajectory going again.