
PostgreSQL website – new design now live - justinclift
https://www.postgresql.org
======
everdev
The design went from looking like 1997 to looking like 2007.

You can still see the old design in the docs:
[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html](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.

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jrobn
The documentation pages are all that matter, and quite frankly, they are
great.

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ximeng
Except that every Google search returns a result from a different random
version number.

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dspillett
They can't really control that as a number of external factors part into
Google's rankings (i.e. links from elsewhere), other than to make navigation
to the right version easy which they seem to have managed (in, my, admittedly
limited, experience there is always a version selection in the page head and
the links go where you'd expect).

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codetrotter
They could straight up disallow the versioned pages in their robots.txt and
for the current version they could have a full copy of the docs without
version number in the URL that instead has .../current/... and those pages
would be allowed for crawlers to index. Then people could jump to older
versions manually from there if they needed to instead of everyone having to
endure the land-on-an-arbitrary-version-number-page annoyance.

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.

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slavik81
Blocking the pages in robots.txt will remove them from the Wayback Machine.
That sucks.

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.

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hitekker
Did they hire a designer to do... this?

Before people say "OSS must look bad" or "It's a minimal style", I encourage
looking at [https://www.djangoproject.com/](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](https://www.oracle.com/database/index.html)
than to a lauded and respected database like Postgres.

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emilsedgh
I mean Django community is a community of web developers.

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.

~~~
hitekker
I'd be forgiving if Postgres was a few-year-old project struggling for
legitimacy. But Postgres is all grown up now, and shouldn't resort to the
excuses of the unsuccessful and immature.

If they didn't care for design, then they should have stuck with the old look,
like [http://sqlite.org](http://sqlite.org) or
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/](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.

~~~
untog
To be honest, if you're judging the quality of Postgres by the design of their
web site then, well, maybe you _should_ steer clear of it. The rest of us will
be just fine.

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mason55
FWIW it doesn't seem like the most important part (the docs) has changed:
[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/indexes.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/indexes.html)

And I'm perfectly fine with that.

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abrkn
I felt great anxiety clicking into docs, fearing some radical change. They're
the same and I love them just the way they are. I read them several times a
day.

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combatentropy
Aww, another website has gone to sticky headers :( You designers obviously
don't use the spacebar to scroll.

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tim333
I wonder if that's here to stay or will die out. They annoyed me enough I made
an extension to zap them though I'm on a 11" macbook so I may be unusual
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbko...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zapfixed/jgiflpbkoefoepgmeifoglafkomgjbge?hl=en)

~~~
kristianp
Shitty website UI that is commercially motivated, e.g. Email harvesting
popups, flickering ads and auto-playing videos, etc. Don't go away by
themselves. They usually need to be blocked.

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cutler
Top navigation needs a rethink. At 1280px width resolution "Your account"
wraps to make room for the Search box.

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justinclift
Thanks. Just emailed the pgsql-www (PostgreSQL web devs) mailing list with
that, so it's not missed. :)

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elmigranto
It's fine, I guess, as long as docs are plain HTML/CSS and use 0 JS. And I
think we are all safe on that front, since those pages are Perl generated or
something, so…

Neat update, old site had its charm, but w/ever.

Love to everyone in PG community (even those responsible for PgAdmin4 :)

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majewsky
What does "Perl-generated" have to do with "no JS"?

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osrec
A much needed update, but the design is still a little rough round the edges.
E.g. excessive use of caps everywhere makes the page look untidy and makes
certain things harder to read.

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ousmanedev
Great job guys. Love it. Keep up the good work.

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acmecorps
Off topic - but does anyone know who (companies especially) that are committed
to developing PostgreSQL?

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ken
You can see company names in the contributor list:
[https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/](https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/)

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Tostino
Great new look, great job everyone who worked on it.

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flukus
Fantastic, now google has tracking all over the site, not just through
analytics but through the CDN fonts as well.

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halflings
Google themselves provide an extension to opt out of Analytics:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-
analytics-o...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-
opt-out/fllaojicojecljbmefodhfapmkghcbnh?hl=en)

~~~
flukus
So to disable the spyware I should just trust a plugin created from the
spyware company for the browser created by the spyware company?

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pedalpete
I'd love to be supportive of this and just say what an awesome job PostgreSQL
have done.

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.

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mike_ivanov
It's Postgres, not "Postgre".

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dandigangi
That's awesome! Huge improvement at least.

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

~~~
justinclift
You joke tweeted to a bunch of volunteers, offering to help out... and you're
surprised they got back to you thinking you might be serious?

