Thanks for the kind words @U01PE7630AC ☺️ We owe a lot of the credit to https://saneef.com/ who we brought in to help us firstly figure out a good "Information Architecture" and then actually design & build the new site (which is assembled with https://www.11ty.dev/, https://antora.org/ and https://typesense.org/)

Thanks for sharing! Maybe the Clojure community could scrape together some funds and ask them to overhaul http://clojure.org and http://clojurescript.org as well? ☺️ To give it a more modern appearance and better content structure, maybe via Clojurists Together? I would be happy to chip in as well.

If I may ask, how much did it cost to design and develop the XTDB website? How many people were involved?

> how much did it cost to design and develop the XTDB website? How many people were involved? This is pretty tough to answer honestly, particularly if factoring in the opportunity costs of all sorts of other things we could have spent the time on. But I can say it took Saneef ~3 months of full-time work, with extensive input from @U01AVNG2XNF and myself (often just a short 10m chat each day, and other times 2-3 hour marathon calls/workshops). We had another person working on the artwork for the homepage too for a couple of weeks. As I'm sure you can imagine, a lot of actual in-depth content on the site (i.e. docs, blog posts, case studies) had been built up over a much longer period (3 years!) and then ported across.

A good chunk of the complexity for Saneef was figuring out the right stack, since we had a very strong preference for using AsciiDoc throughout (which is what drove us toward 11ty). At one point he even spiked a much lighter weight alternative to Antora but we decided that would probably be a dead end / much more costly choice in the long term.

@U01PE7630AC Yeah, the project was a bit peculiar in some ways. We had a lot of baggage with the old http://opencrux.com website ... I'd say that over half the project was figuring out how to deal with the legacy data and SSG, migrate forward, and maintain cohesive information architecture while (mostly) reusing old content. I really wish http://xtdb.com was itself open source, but there are concerns around opening the storefront to a product. If it were, I think it's probably the nicest SCSS I've ever seen in the wild ... certainly something I'd point other people to. I can DM you with rough costs... I'm not sure if Saneef or Hashir (the artist) would be comfortable with me sharing their old rates in a public forum. 🙂

I think a lot of people seriously underestimate just how much time and effort is involved in website redesigns and reorganizations... even people who work in the web industry...

@U04V70XH6 Yes, indeed. Structuring and presenting the content in the best way requires much effort. And we could put that effort into improving the product itself. But if we invest effort into “marketing” the product to the right people in the right way at the right time, we might attract more attention, more users, more funding, etc. Rich’s talks on YouTube are a great example of “marketing efforts,” which inspired many people to try Clojure, some of whom stuck around and passed it on. When, say, 80-90% of the value has been implemented (i.e., when the product is “feature complete”), it can make sense to shift some efforts towards “marketing” rather than improving the product by some low percentage by implementing esoteric features with relatively little utility. Clojure is an excellent example of a somewhat conservative product when it comes to adding new features, where backward compatibility and stability are prioritized. As the number of users increases, the demand for new features increases, and one must work extra hard to maintain a lean product. But the pros of having more users tend to outweigh the cons as long as one does not cave to all user requests uncritically.