Front page nits

[John Yates]

The triple "Get Bazaar, Get Going, Get Help" is an awkward parallel construction.  Bazaar is a proper noun, Going is a part of a phrasal verb form [1] and Help (though capitalized) is a common noun.  The Get Going link and icons point to a page that is decidely not about how a newbie might get going.  Rather the page is entitled "Bazaar Extras" and lists various resources, most of which would be irrelevant to a newbie.  Elsewhere on the home page links to this resources page use the term Extras.  I suggest that the Get triple would be both more accurate and a clearer parallel construction if the object of each Get were consistently a noun.  So how about "Get Bazaar, Get Extras, Get Help"?

Like others before me I guestion the blue-circle/right-arrow icons.  Visually they are somewhat unattractive because they fail to line up vertically.  As best as I can tell they are there to suggest that the text immediately to the left is a link.  This seems to be necessary because the of the failure to use a bold font.  Elsewhere within the central yellow area any bold blue-grey text is an obvious link [2].  Changing the font would help.  Rephrasing the left hand column simply to assert (an approximation) of the referenced page's title would reduce the feeling that a pointer is needed:

Bazaar feature overview
Bazaar Explorer visual tour 
Launchpad code hosting
Bazaar plugin-registry

(To my mind that list would read as more of a progression if Launchpad were moved to the end.)

Within the right hand column vertical alignment could be reinforced by rephrasing the news titles:

September 22, 2009: Released Bazaar 2.0.0
September 10, 2009: Released Bazaar 2.0.0rc2
September 09, 2009: Released Bazaar 1.18.1

/john


[1] As part of the effort to make the site accessible to non-native English speakers it is interesting to note that http://www.eslcafe.com (a site devoted to the discipline of teaching English as a second language) devotes no less that 12 pages in its "Confusing Words" section to the word get (http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar.html).  http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/confusing_words_get12.html takes up the ambiguity of "get going" meaning either to leave or to become active and productive.

[2] Actually, this is not entirely true.  "What is Bazaar?" has all the appearance of a link yet it is not.  Should it not point to the feature overview page?