I did some what research on this for ggez once upon a time, reading every project page I could and trying to figure out what made me like or not like them, and comparing with others. The loose recipe I developed is more or less these things, in this order:

• name and one-sentence description of what the hell your tool is
• one-paragraph introduction/pitch
• a few bullet points for features and non-features
• actual meat now that the reader is still interested: example code, deeper discussions of the neat parts – though I find it difficult not to go TOO deep here; refer to other docs as much as possible, give the user entry points into the most useful things
• Community/contact info
• License

This is far from the only recipe of course, and you always gotta modify it based on what you’re actually presenting. But that’s the format that tends to have all the stuff I actually want to see.

These pages almost never have what I’m looking for, which is example code. I actively search “[unknown project] github” to avoid their homepage

I find the boring old Github-standard source tree with the rendered README.md to be a much more useful starting point than these landing pages.

Me too. I think there might be value into making a website instead, if it is well structured. But the whole idea of just presenting the exact same thing but with slicker visuals, sounds silly to me

Especially since the important information (repo.description) is missing on the landing page.

Landing pages do work but the recipe is primarily designed for non-engineers.

We have a different landing page recipe which usually involves code

I do tend to avoid them. Specifically because my brain doesn’t like the overly big “install” and “source” part. It first wants to have something like

• what is this about
• are there releases
• how old are those releases
• (for) which OS / language / framework
• how do the issues look like (anything catching my eye)

And most of them can be gained faster from the github page. The above example could definitely be changed to include those things, but most of the time these websites are just SEO/PR fluff and have no content.

But I’m also not an ‘end user’ - and probably a power user..

When I’m not looking specifically for the source, landing pages have more info like a link to docs, community stuff, etc. There’s also some room for positive design personality that you won’t get being embedded inside a forge’s chrome—it doesn’t have to be the obnoxious, full-screen-banner-followed-by-3-callouts sort of layout.

What I don’t like is bloating a README to hell & back with far more than it needs—stuff like massive image list of sponsors, badges for CI results, heck, basically any sort of multimedia that isn’t a screenshot, is often better elsewhere. Ideally the README shouldn’t be a RENDERME just to read it too.

Basically I think the landing pages are often too fluffy in design, but so are the READMEs. Many ‘contemporary’ READMEs should be the landing page, and the README should be cut down to be plain-text readable.