Update homepage to be more readable and user-friendly

[paigem]

This is currently a draft PR meant mostly to share the code that I've created so far. I expect many conversations either in relevant issues (e.g. #873) and on the Discourse Forum post here about how to further improve the homepage, but this is a start!

I worked with @abarciauskas-bgse on this PR.

What we discussed today/rationales for our suggested update:

• Trim down content on homepage to emphasize the important content
• Remove the feeds to Twitter and Discourse (side note: the Discourse one seems to currently show July posts?) so as to not clutter the homepage
• Remove the "What is Pangeo" and "Goals" since these are discussed on the "About Pangeo" site, and (inspired by this article shared by @annefou) most visitors to the Pangeo site are probably not interested in many of these details and thus don't need to be on the main page
• Following from Update homepage to point to guideance for our core expected user groups #873 we wanted to help direct visitors to the Pangeo website into the appropriate places. This can certainly be improved upon, but we made a start (see screenshot below)
• We reworded the description of Pangeo from "A community platform for big data geoscience" to "A community promoting open, reproducible, and scalable science".
  • "Platform" was removed as we thought the word was confusing and detracts from the sense of Pangeo being a community of people
  • We removed "big data geoscience", since we think that Pangeo is not only for folks working with big data, but rather is focused on scalable scientific workflows and open science practices. The wording we ended up choosing is from the "What is Pangeo?" section on the current homepage.

---

The screenshot below is our first draft of an updated website. Note that I am new to rst and so the presentation of the content could likely be easily improved by those who are more familiar with rst!

[guillaumeeb]

Thanks @paigem and @abarciauskas-bgse for this first draft! I think it looks great, I really like the really simple landing page explaining where to go next.

I made a few comments directly on the changes, and here are another one:

Remove the feeds to Twitter and Discourse (side note: the Discourse one seems to currently show July posts?) so as to not clutter the homepage

Discourse might not be really useful, and not up to date on my screen either. However, it would be really nice if the home page had some "News feed", to show Pangeo last events/news. If the Twitter feed is the closest to this, I'd vote to leave it on first page.

[guillaumeeb]

I'm not sure that adding 'Discourse' is really needed in the navbar.

[paigem]

I agree that a longer name might be less useful, but Aimee and I both mentioned that we were confused about this terminology during our first few Pangeo website visits years ago. In my experience, most Pangeo folks refer to it as "Discourse" and in initially I didn't know that "Discourse" was a web forum.

Maybe we can get some others to weight in here, but I'd still vote for "Discourse Forum" in the navbar for extra clarity.

[guillaumeeb]

Pangeo software: what is it? Pangeo ecosystem?

[paigem]

Good point! Maybe Pangeo software is poorly defined. (Though we could like to the Pangeo Packages page, which also needs a serious update!)

I like your suggestion of "Pangeo ecosystem", as it encompasses more than just the software side of Pangeo. My only hesitation there is that the term is more vague. The table I added here is largely to steer people in the right direction quickly. It's hard to know, but I'd guess that a lot of visitors to the site are there to find quick answers to coding problems, in which case explicitly stating "software" instead of "ecosystem" might be more functional. My primary goal with this table is to address some of the most frequent questions our site visitors may have.

That all being said, happy to change to "ecosystem" if we think that's best! 😊

[guillaumeeb]

Suggested change

	- Post or answer questions in the `Pangeo Discourse Forum <https://discourse.pangeo.io/>`_, attend a `community meeting <https://pangeo.io/meeting-notes.html>`_, or start issues/create pull requests on our `GitHub repos <https://github.com/pangeo-data/>`_!
	- Post or answer questions in the `Pangeo Discourse Forum <https://discourse.pangeo.io/>`_, attend a `community meeting <https://pangeo.io/meeting-notes.html>`_, or open issues/create pull requests on our `GitHub repos <https://github.com/pangeo-data/>`_!

[guillaumeeb]

I think this is important to have a Pangeo Gallery link somewhere in the homepage. Maybe in 'learn more' table section?

[TomAugspurger]

Yep, this is what sphinx uses to figure out which documents in the build (https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/directives.html?highlight=toctree#table-of-contents).

Did you comment it out since you didn't want to include the toctree on the homepage? If you want, you can do something like

.. toctree::
   :hidden:

   about
   ...

to hide the toctree. I think we'd still want some way to navigate to those pages though, and I'm not sure how hidden interacts with the sphinx's navigation stuff.