Some quick pieces of feedback for a newbie looking at the website

[choldgraf]

Hey all - this looks like a really neat project!

I just took a look through the codemeta website for the first time, and just wanted to give some of my first-impressions in case they're opportunities to improve the site! I hope they don't come across as criticisms, they are meant in the spirit of constructive feedback! Feel free to disregard this entirely :-)

Some of the comments might seem a bit silly, but I tried to keep my relatively naive perspective in browsing the site, since I think that's the perspective many users would have.

• I like how the page explains the need and motivation for code metadata, but after reading the front page I still wasn't sure what codemeta does. Maybe beginning with a short "this is what codemeta does" paragraph would be helpful.
• The word "CrossWalk" shows up on the page, but I never saw an explanation of what this means. Maybe this is a technical word that users will already know, but it'd be helpful to explain something like "CrossWalks are a means of mapping key/values between different styles of metadata. The CodeMeta project maintains CrossWalks between a number of different metadata types (e.g. Python distutils and R DESCRIPTION files) and a common "codemeta" format.
• The word "Terms" shows up in the navbar, but I originally didn't click on it because I assumed that it was short for "Terms and Conditions" (aka, license stuff) rather than "metadata terms". Perhaps this could be "Fields" to avoid the confusion?
• I found the fonts a bit small to read - perhaps they could be increased in size in order to be more legible?
• I also didn't see a link-out to an introduction to what JSON linked data is, this would be helpful for newbies that don't know what it is! edit: I found the video on the JSON-LD sub-page really helpful, perhaps it could be linked to from a "getting started" header?

[cboettig]

💯