Front page for bokeh.org

At present, the top level bokeh.org URL redirects to the docs site (currently bokeh.pydata.org but eventually moving to docs.bokeh.org). It would be nice to have a simple but polished “Front Page” at bokeh.org that provides answers to “What is Bokeh?” and “Why use Bokeh?” right up front, as well as quickly gets people to other appropriate destinations:

• Documentation
• This Discourse
• Tutorial Notebooks
• GitHub

Other things? A gallery or link to gallery? Maybe a section with a few very high level signposts e.g. “If you to accomplish X, then…” for some common scenarios.

I guess the main thing is to keep this page very short and simple and to the point.

I’d like help with:

• nailing down the right content
• choosing the best/simplest to maintain static site generator
• finding/creating compelling examples or images to capture attention
• visual design and layout, frameworks, theme, etc
• making sure it is responsive/works well on mobile

In a nutshell: help actually implementing this. My web-design skills are bad. Really, really bad. The Bokeh project deserves better than I can produce.

I could provide any help since my grad school is over.

That would be great! Do you have any thoughts on some of the above points?

I’ve limited HTML and web-design experience. I could contribute to “nailing down right content” and " finding/creating compelling examples or images to capture attention".
I’d also be happy to learn & contribute to other points as well.

@samirak93 TBH the website-dev is my own personal weak point, so that is the area I would really love to get help with. But if you’d like to either sketch out ideas for an outline, or start collecting images (ideally with some links to source or source code) that would also be super helpful.

As a concrete example, the front page for the Julia Language seems like a decent starting point to emulate:

https://julialang.org/

I have made a new bokeh.org repo with a project GH-Pages configured to load from https://bokeh.org/ For now it just says “Hello World”. I plan to crib liberally from the JuliaLang Jekyll/Bootstrap site and get a barebones front page up this week. I think (hope) it might be easier for other folks to plug in and help improve something that already exists in some minimal form.

I really like the “In a Nutshell” section of the Julia site. I think it would be valuable to define a set of core descriptors for Bokeh. I threw together the list below What does everyone think? Are there descriptors that are missing, or should be dropped? How can the descriptions be refined and made better?

Flexible

Bokeh makes it simple to create common plots, but also can handle custom or specialized use-cases

Interactive

Tools and widgets can drive “what if” questions or drill-down explorations

Shareable

Content can be published in web pages, notebooks

Productive

You you stay in Python where you are already familiar with PyData tools

Powerful

But can use JS when you necessary for advanced cases

Open Source

Everything is BSD licensed

Are we giving examples for each? For instance, we could give couple of examples for “Flexible” with one plot coded in few lines while another plot being custom.

Also, should we include bokeh’s compatibility with other libraries? Like Holoviews, Datashader, making it more flexible to use across different area.

We could link to examples, maybe here or maybe elsewhere on the page. If you look at this part of at this Julia page, it is basically a very high level sales pitch. This part of the page should be a direct and concise (and opinionated) as possible. This part of the page needs to fit on less than a single screen and get people in the door. Details are for elsewhere IMO.