Which is the best DN site?
Developer Network sites are used a lot by programmers. Here is what I found most usable.
There are several sites I frequent (at varying frequency) these days. Most of them have similar functionality. They give you access to articles, discussions, downloads, search, polls etc. Since technology information explodes very quickly, information architecture of these sites better be well thought out so that programmers' brains are not taxed any more than required!
Here’s my rating on various sites' home pages.
- Search, downloads and links to articles are easily accessible.
- Intel forums for their compilers were really helpful to me.
- Link to RSS is provided, but it is down below.
- Three column layout, wasting quite a bit of real-estate.
- Generally unexciting design.
- Borland’s IDEs used to be the best and most usable ones when I used those 10 years ago. I’ve not used their products for a while now, but I am sure they continue to be excellent. Unfortunately, website too looks dated, though it is better than Intel’s.
- Articles are listed below; for a first time visitor, it is not very easy to even realize they’ve articles.
- No RSS feed is provided.
- Well organized. Pleasant. Search is easily accessible.
- Wiki, blogs and discussions are easily accessible.
- Articles remain the primary focus.
- RSS/XML feeds are available -- it would’ve been nice to have the usual orange button.
- 3 column layout with wasted space on the right is irritating. Also, vertical spacing could’ve been little more.
- Pretty much everything BEA has.
- Liquid layout, with standard XML button.
- Sun being Sun, top quarter of the screen is reserved for 2 marketing spins. This kind of demotes "What’s New" that comes below. I’d suggest moving the "Save the Date" box for upcoming event to the space for these ads.
- Oracle’s technology profile is way too broad. Still, OTN does a good job at getting to what you need quickly enough.
- They’ve an accessible version. Full marks!
- Only improvement required is to make this little more spaced out. It is kind of overloaded.
- Very nice.
- dW’s tutorials and articles have the best presentation in my opinion. Using dW’s XML authoring template is a good place to start.
And the winner is...
- Very nice front page. This is far better than any 3-column layout. It is ideal for 1-second scanning and lets you identify what you need to dive into later. Search is prominently available.
- "Announcements" are easily noticable.
- "New This Week" is available as the top content, as well as RSS.
- I used to hate this site before -- but the current design is very nice. I still hate their "Library" section, which is full of frames, and tree-like navigation.
Before supporters of Open Source jump at me -- I use GNU/Linux a lot. I use Oracle, LAMP and Java (in that order) far more than any Microsoft technologies. I use Windows XP at home only for synching to my Pocket PC and for tracking my Expenses -- which I never got around to converting to OpenOffice Calc.
Also, I am not in Microsoft’s pay! One has to acknowledge a good thing when one sees one; that’s all.
Note that I’ve only covered sites that company’s have put together. In the OSS world, there may be better things. I like Ruby on Rails, Plone, Spring Framework and Apache sites. Eclipse.org is really annoying at the moment, but the new design is going to make it much better.
Posted: September 10, 2005 07:01 PM
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