"WTF IS IT?" is an endemic problem with marketing and startups.
Marketing is a skill, that many people in marketing so often don't have, and lot of leaders fail to grasp. It's so sad.
Imagine losing 1/2 of your potential uptake because of poor choice of words.
You have to deal with various layers of transpilation on your JS, styles and assets and that all needs to be flexible enough to fit a wide set of use cases for the community. It's gotten to the point you need to be an expert in all of the different ways you can bundle and deploy a JS app in order for the jargon associated with these tools to make any sense.
I see it over, over and over again.
I see young people pitching their tech and I have no f*ing clue what they are talking about.
I would say >50% of web sites don't do a very good job of explaining anything.
Vercel is one of the worst offenders.
That said - I feel for some of these dudes just wanting to make a framework, struggling a bit with the 'communication' part.
Literally one sentence.
- People might interpret that as "drop-in replacement for webpack", which is definitely not true
- Even as just "a replacement for webpack"; Webpack and Vite have a lot of overlap, and it makes sense to compare them, but I think there are too many asterisks and nuances to say they're equivalent, in official materials, unqualified
Just have a hyper link that directions to a comparison page explaining the nuance. Even without the hyperlink I wouldn’t assume people would think it’s a 1:1 clone drop in replacement. People don’t just drop in a new tool without research and comparing it against their new tool.
Vite (French word for "quick", pronounced /vit/, like "veet") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It consists of two major parts:
* A dev server that provides rich feature enhancements over native ES modules, for example extremely fast Hot Module Replacement (HMR).
* A build command that bundles your code with Rollup, pre-configured to output highly optimized static assets for production.
And next week there will be yet another "revolutionary" front-end thingamajig.
Edit: the "why" page mentioned by the sibling comment actually explains it
I wanna say it's been a decade of front end build tools that have come and gone (or stayed.. we still use a grunt file from 2013) and they all do more or less the same things a front end dev needs.
- fast (very important) - Fully Typed APIs (very important)
Just those two points would convince me to try it and I can see it right away on the landing page.
At my company, I looked at Vite 6+ months ago and decided it doesn't make sense for us, yet, because of some specific tooling gaps, but it's a tool that I consider "cutting edge" in the frontend tooling world. I think they're doing just fine and their page doesn't have any major issues with their copy. Do you actually do frontend dev?
Those are completely generic descriptors.
Those are arguably 'differentiators' to the problem they are solving, but they don't first explain the problem they are solving.
I think you're right about this and the "hero text" on their landing page should explain that in one crisp sentence. I imagine the authors of the project just aren't good at this stuff so hope they read this thread and refine the messaging.
There's a great page on how it's cutting edge here: https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html. I suggest you try using it to see for yourself.
"We have some amazing fast tech, that will make your life better -> read our white paper! We have good APIs"
Tell people what it is first, roughly what it's for, then the benefits. Then the article.
Why?
Because it never tells you what it does. It’s “front end tooling” which could be anything from a new JS target language to a framework to something else.
The features don’t help: it’s fast. That could apply to anything.
It’s only when they talk about the alternatives like ESBuild and webpack that I get a sense of what it does. That’s several clicks in to figure it out.
Please put what the thing does front and center.