website provides difficult onboarding experience.

[mikeblas]

I haven't heard of dbatools.io before. Someone pointed me to the website.

If I visit https://dbatools.io/, I see a very large banner that says "Instance migrations and best practice implementations have never been safer, faster or freer." This implies the tools are for instance migration and not much else. "Best practice implementations" of what, precisely?

This banner covers pretty much my whole screen, except for the menu bar on top. If I scroll down a bit I find a list of features:

• Free and open source
• community driven
• automation is awesome
• lots of upvotes

Maybe it's subjective, but these just aren't features. They might be benefits -- though "lots of upvotes" is completely arbitrary and juts marketing garbage. These bullets don't tell me anything about what the product (project? tool?) can do.

Scrolling down further, I see some endorsements from -- uh, people? -- and then a list of blog updates.

A project home page ought to be a compelling story about why someone might want to use the product (tools? project?) or get involved. Instead, I'm left wondering what this thing really is.

Coupled with other issues I've reported in the website, it's difficult to get started even understanding what dbatools really is, not to mention get started using it.

Instead of the helpless "features" list, why not consider a concise statement of the dbatools mission and goals? What does it really deliver? It can be concise, accurate, and compelling. Maybe something like: "dbatools is a set of commandlets for PowerShell that facilitate SQL Server administration, migration, and integration tasks".

Or, something even better -- but it won't be hard to beat "automation is awesome" or "lots of upvotes".

For sure, this is subjective feedback, but I hope you'll be able to consider improving the "out of box" experience and attract even more users.

(Edited to clean up a bunch of typos which threatened my vanity.)

[potatoqualitee]

This is AWESOME! Thank you so very much. We appreciate the time you took to let us know how to improve. We're a bit underwater right now, but will refer to this very issue when redoing the website <3

[andreasjordan]

Let me link this one here: dataplat/dbatools#8039 - maybe we need a crawler to detect dead or redirected links and change them...

[wsmelton]

Google Analytics collects dead links, just don't have much time to review it.

The painful task is migrating sites from WordPress does not update the HTML links for content that lives in WP and the path to that content in GitHub. It has to be done manually, that is why you will find ton of URLs pointing to the old WP content we hosted there (images mostly).

[mikeblas]

Thanks for taking it in the spirit it was intended, @potatoqualitee :)

I'll open a couple of other issues with specific feedback. Please let me know if there's another way I can help.

[potatoqualitee]

Thanks again, @mikeblas. I would certainly love your feedback again once the site has been migrated.

To give you a backstory of how we all got here: when I created dbatools.io, I wanted to make the toolset accessible to people who weren't familiar with, or were afraid of, GitHub.com. GitHub wasn't widely known then and even for me, when a project would lead there, I'd think "Just give me a download link like Notepad++ does."

So I downloaded a good looking WordPress them and got to work. I matched our color-scheme to SQL Server Management Studio to make it familiar to the SQL Server community then filled in some blanks.

There were parts I didn't know what to do with but that I thought could increase confidence of the toolset within the community. Like stars, people love stars. I placed value on stars in the TechNet Scripting Gallery, and so I just transferred those over. The other stuff was mostly placeholders till there was greater adoption, but with greater adoption came less time to spend on the website. These placeholders have since become outdated.

The people part, I thought, and still think, is important. When I found Ola Hallengren's T-SQL scripts, I was very encouraged by the fact that he had all of these people I know of recommending his toolset. Using his scripts became a no-brainer for me. When others who are well-known within the community started recommending dbatools, I was eager to add them to the site because PowerShell had a poor reputation within the SQL Server community (initially, it was presented as a developer tool and not an end-user tool) and we needed as many endorsements as we could get.

Since then, we moved from the initial adoption phase to the widespread adoption phase, and the website never kept up. You can see that even in the subtitle, as you highlighted. Back when the site was created, dbatools was all about migrations, but has grown a great deal since. Also, I had to migrate off of WordPress because our site was regularly getting hacked. So I did a quickfix, mid-pandemic, and exported the whole thing to GitHub Pages. That broke a few links and some functionality :/

We've had awesome people offer to help with the website, but I am super particular and needed to work directly with them. Unfortunately, I didn't have time between maintenance, burnout, the pandemic and working on the dbatools book.

Now, it's time to pivot to a different target audience. People like you who were referred by someone who enjoys using dbatools.

After three years of writing, we're currently finalizing our book, dbatools in a month of lunches. Once it's published, the website will be my top priority and I look very forward to working with you as an audience member and potential end-user who is looking for immediate answers 💞

If you don't mind sharing, where and how did you hear about dbatools?

[mikeblas]

This is still open and the text I mention hasn't changed at all. Does that mean the site has yet to be migrated?

[wsmelton]

Migration was completed, but life happens.