Website Relaunch
The Crystal website here at crystal-lang.org has received a major overhaul.
This project has been in the making for a long time, with the first design previews dating back at least to 2020. Many people have been involved in the process which made very slow progress because there were always more important things to do (such as developing a programming language). But the limitations of the old website have been quite substantial and finally we managed to complete the relaunch.
Some of the highlight improvements:
- Responsive layout that fits small and large viewports
- Refined typography
- Enhanced site navigation system
- Completely reorganized homepage
- Completely reorganized Install page
- Completely reorganized Community page
- New Releases page
- New Sponsors options
- Taxonomy (categories and tags) for blog posts
- Dark mode support
For comparison, the new and old homepage:
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New and old install and community pages:
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A particular focus was revamping the sponsorship options. Previously announced changes to the sponsorship tiers got implemented with different logo sizes on the homepage, extra cards for highlighting top supporters on the Sponsors page and enhanced thank-you messages in release notes.
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The underlying engine has remained the same: We’re still using Jekyll as static site generator. It has served us well and we expect it will continue to do so in the future. The entire styles and many templates have been rebuilt from scratch to implement the new design. There has been good progress and broad browser adoption of modern web technologies that allows using some fancy new features like CSS layers and advanced grid layouts. We’re still quite confident about good browser support with way over 90% coverage.
The new website has gone through a lot of reviews and quality control, but there are inevitably gonna be some mishaps. If you find any issues, please report them to the bug tracker. We also have direct edit links on the bottom of every page!
We hope the community loves the fresh look, and that newcomers find it easy to navigate and learn about our beloved language.