Show HN: Redesigned Caddy homepage, including an On-Demand TLS demo | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Redesigned Caddy homepage, including an On-Demand TLS demo

caddyserver.com

Phase I of our new website is now live! It better showcases Caddy's unique abilities, and offers many more opportunities to highlight our amazing sponsors who make this project possible.

We're still working on a new download page and completely revamping the documentation, so those have not been refreshed yet. Those will be phases II and III.

Right now our content is primarily technical. Over time we'll be adding more sponsor highlights and user stories, along with more relevant content for product managers, executives, and HR, to make Caddy's value proposition even more compelling and clear.

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Some thoughts...

- I generally like the style / theme / fonts

- The 3d transforms on code previews is annoying, please don't

- Lots of words for a landing page, some rather grandiose claims as well, it's generally long

- Why should I switch to Caddy from Nginx? AutoTLS is not a good reason for me. I already have that. The ability to configure it via an API might be, but then I don't want to live change my configuration in most cases. I want them as code that is versioned and deployed like any other service.

- Cluster coordination is a potential value prop, haven't thought about it hard, but you immediately follow that with "fewer moving parts" which doesn't jive with the previous point

The main reason I haven't really tried Caddy is because Nginx already works fine and I don't want to learn a new config format and ecosystem. Is there really an ROI for a migration and the learning that needs to come with it? I'm not sure how I'd be convinced tbh (feel free to ask questions or ideate).

> - The 3d transforms on code previews is annoying, please don't

Calling this one out specifically to agree, please don't do this, don't degrade readability, it serves nobody and likely excites only people who aren't Caddy's audience. The CA one with long lines that overflow is especially obnoxious to try to read.

Interesting; the 3D transforms don't actually affect how much text fits on a line. So even if we remove the transform, the text will still wrap/overflow.

It does actually excite some of our readers, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072414

I've also heard a lot off any record that the content is really interesting even though it is a lot of text, because of the subtle spatial effect.

If there's an accessibility issue I could look into putting a toggle to flatten them out.

I don't care that it wraps and overflows. I care that scrolling tilted text degrades readability in two different ways at the same time, and one of them is utterly unnecessary.

EDIT: Since it sounds like it's not clear why this is bad, scrolling text horizontally and having it move diagonally is an objectively poor experience.

re: tilted code, you have more statements against it here than you have for it at the link, where there is just one afaict

neither is statistically significant

> I've also heard a lot off any record

Are these people already caddy users? Probably not the right people to ask, they are early adopters and typically positive of most things a project does outside of the part they use

what's hilarious is that the Y: -25deg comes from a marketing.css

Yes we share this CSS across multiple marketing pages.

It's more that this undesirable visual comes from marketing as we expected and suspected, because usually marketing does things that are anti-usability and readability for the flashiness, not realizing that it works against them.

Thanks for the feedback!

- 3D transforms: We got feedback before that people really liked them, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072414 -- they're not extreme, which we tried to avoid. I guess some people will like them and others won't... personally I think they make it visually interesting and draw attention and are still quite legible. That's me though.

- Words: Yeah, it's long. I want to break things out into more pages so that each section has its own page, eventually, but life got busy so I had to kind of consolidate for now.

- Grandiose claims: I _believe_ everything we've written is accurate/true, many of which cite original sources. Maybe some claims have multiple interpretations or contexts (e.g. I'd wager "more secure, more reliable, and more scalable than any other solution" is true in many ways, even if it's not always the right tool in every situation). I'll review to make sure we're avoiding false hyperbole but from what I can recall, I stand by what the page claims.

- Switching from Nginx: I was hoping our homepage was able to convey that even though you can have automatic HTTPS with other servers, they don't come with it built-in or on by default, which Caddy does; and even if you do have auto HTTPS, Caddy's is _better_ (for various reasons explained on the page). I think we directly address competition like nginx in several places, such as simpler configs, memory safety, etc. Maybe I need to make it more obvious. Actually, I want to have a dedicated Compare page where we compare Caddy with other software.

- Fewer moving parts: We're saying that the moving parts are optional, I guess. Of course you can run Caddy in a cluster and it works really well in that setup, but you don't _NEED_ to do that probably; and even if you do, you don't need extra tools, libraries, scripts, or utilities that you often need with other solutions. I'll try to clarify that in the wording.

_> The main reason I haven't really tried Caddy is because Nginx already works fine and I don't want to learn a new config format and ecosystem._

Fair. (You can actually keep your config format, Caddy has an nginx adapter you can run it with.)

> Is there really an ROI for a migration and the learning that needs to come with it?

For many companies/professionals, _yes_ Caddy definitely saves a lot of time, technical complexity, and even prevents expensive downtime. Some of the testimonials on the homepage refer to this, like the organization that put Caddy in front of a service last-minute that was about to fail their PCI compliance audit.

Tell me more about your use case and what pain points you do have!

> Tell me more about your use case and what pain points you do have!

I don't have pain points with my reverse proxy or auto tls. I honestly don't want a reverse proxy that does auto TLS by default. I put it more places where it is not needed and would prefer to opt in when/where needed.

> I _believe_ everything we've written is accurate/true, many of which cite original sources.

I see one section that does this with questionable value. That section actually decreased my trust. They are 5+ years old and the one I looked at in detail (third) only mentions caddy in one sentence. I would not put something like that as "proof" on a website. I understand you believe these things, but now I believe and trust less.

The visual language looks slick to me, and it appears that a lot of thought went into the redesign. A few critical remarks (intended as constructive feedback/thoughts):

- I second the point from the sibling comment that the 3d transformations don’t feel right for the terminal demos. I first didn’t realise at all that the terminal demos show-cased something meaningful. And when I did, I found it hard to follow, due to the distortion.

- The terminal demos are a cool idea, but seeing that you also try to target a non-technical audience, I’m not sure it’s the most approachable and expressive medium. Maybe a video with voice-over comments would be easier to follow?

- There is a lot of content on the page, and I’m not sure I understand the information hierarchy. Like: below the intro header, it starts with certificate stuff, then some general selling points, then some DNS demo I don’t really know what it’s about, then certificates again, then other features, etc. Overall, it feels borderline overwhelming to me.

- Related to my previous point, if I wouldn’t know Caddy previously, I might get the impression that Caddy is mainly about certificates/TLS, just because that’s featured very prominently. Maybe my mental model wasn’t right, though, because I always thought Caddy was a general-purpose web server primarily, that also happens to provide some nifty convenience features around certificate auto-renewal.

- Very nitty: I find the green background glow a bit too bright, and hence contrasting too little with the green text colour of the headline. Also, does the dark mode button have any effect?

This is good feedback, thanks!

Ok, we'll try to think of another visually interesting way to tell a non-visual story, to see if we can replace the 3D transforms.

I just hate the trend that most tech landing pages have these days of random graphics that don't mean anything. I want our content to be substantial.

You're right there's a lot of content. I'm not best sure how to organize it, except maybe to break it into other pages. There's a LOT to cover and convey. I just didn't have time to break it up for this iteration but maybe we will later!

_> Related to my previous point, if I wouldn’t know Caddy previously, I might get the impression that Caddy is mainly about certificates/TLS, just because that’s featured very prominently. Maybe my mental model wasn’t right, though, because I always thought Caddy was a general-purpose web server primarily, that also happens to provide some nifty convenience features around certificate auto-renewal._

Caddy's flagship feature is TLS -- most people discover it because of its exceptional offering here. But you are right, it is a general purpose server and proxy. But our TLS features is one major thing that sets us apart.

I'll also see what we can do about the green background, maybe to darken it a bit.

Dark mode does have an effect on some pages, like the Features page. And the up-and-coming docs pages that aren't published yet. The theme makes a big difference on those, and it will on the homepage someday too.

Really appreciate your consideration! We'll work on improvements.

> I just hate the trend that most tech landing pages have these days of random graphics that don't mean anything. I want our content to be substantial.

Couching substantial content in the visual language of "random graphics" results in the parent comment.

You could have cake and eat some of it too if the transforms straightened out on mouseover/click/tap. It wouldn't make the transformed ones any easier to read, but it'd at least let people opt out of the flash to focus on the substance (and further signal that they _aren't_ random graphics despite the effect).

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