PostgreSQL website – new design now live
postgresql.org
postgresql.org
You can still see the old design in the docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html
I appreciate the update, but it's interesting from a design perspective how many technically amazing products have dated website design. I do appreciate not trying to force a fashionable design template onto every site, but there are some really slick minimal ones that can be used that will bring the design up to the current decade at least.
I could have saved a lot of time, over the past 20 years, if I'd simply followed the rule: Is this the most boring webpage I've seen all week? Yes => it's going to be a good database.
CockroachDB, for instance, is able to simultaneously focus on Jepsen-style distributed systems verification and agile administrative interfaces, whose design aesthetic is reflected in the website. And there are plenty of unsupported academia-made databases that are essentially abandonware. I would not advocate for overreliance on this heuristic.
Absolutely not. Design and Sales in Enterprise has as much to do with each other as Sales and Code Quality, almost none.
whoa - you are setting yourself up, if that is any reference to Postgres..
It's interesting from a user perspective how many nice websites have been ruined in an attempt to not look dated.
Good. I hope someone in the team was saying, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!" - because it's some time after 2007 when the web went entirely to shit.
That really is my only problem with the postgresql docs though and that’s saying something. The content itself of the postgresql docs is of stellar quality.
Qt did that for their documentation when they changed ownership and moved their website. They didn't migrate the old documentation, either. This made updating broken links much more difficult because I couldn't easily read the pages they originally pointed to.
Maybe better to specify canonical URL as the latest one.
Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, and the documentation is mostly pretty great, but this definitely bugs me and apparently a bunch of other people too.
I am one of the people that gave you an upvote, but this is not a fair comparison at all.
I guess for postgres 80% of people would be happy with always landing on the current version, and making an extra click or adding a version to their search if they really need documentation for older versions. Maybe adding a brief version history at the bottom of documentation pages would reduce the need for old versions even further.
There are no direct links between the urls below which both have the same content.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html
You have to click to another page and back again to change to the "current" link if you're on the "10" link.
Incidentally, UNIX/Linux man pages also put the examples section near the end.
Similarly, a site for a cheap grocery store must look cheap. Customers shouldn’t think millions were spent on it. Examples: https://aldi.com, https://www.lidl.com
So we can see the PregreSQL and the PostgreSQL ;-)
Before people say "OSS must look bad" or "It's a minimal style", I encourage looking at https://www.djangoproject.com/. Aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing clarity, this website sets the standard for a technical project's homepage redesign.
Boring and half-hearted UI's should be relegated to the likes of https://www.oracle.com/database/index.html than to a lauded and respected database like Postgres.
I hope so, and if I'm ever in need of a webpage design, I'd love to hire that same designer.
Seriously, the site is close to perfect. It looks nice enough, it's clean, fast and full of content - instead of being full of useless eye candy and short on actual information.
Fancy is good, fast is better.
It's expected of them to have a better looking website.
Please remember that this is all volunteers. I'm pretty much sure Postgres community would love if you help them on this.
If they didn't care for design, then they should have stuck with the old look, like http://sqlite.org or http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/. Both are perfect examples of "we know exactly what we want to be and we don't need to worry about design".
But a half-baked result that pretends to be finished, suggests a lack of confidence in the software that it champions. Which is, frankly, unbecoming.
And I'm perfectly fine with that.
Neat update, old site had its charm, but w/ever.
Love to everyone in PG community (even those responsible for PgAdmin4 :)
I don't expect an open-source project with the scale and demands of Postgre to have some sort of cutting edge website. But I don't see a big improvement on usability (though I haven't spent a lot of time on the last site), the documentation is still of the old design.
The starkness is glaring, and I feel this will look very dated in the very near term. Postgre's color scheme itself doesn't help things.
I suspect the most important page is probably documentation, is that not right? And yet, there is almost no content on the main documentation page, you have to link out to the old documentation.
Fun story - I joke tweeted that their website was super old and I'd redo it for free. Someone from their team tried to get me to do it. Haha