Three ways to introduce the workbench
Comparing a live product demonstration, an editorial research page, and an agent-led starting point.
A homepage has to make a promise and give the visitor a reason to believe it. For Alkemist, the promise is a place to publish research that people can explore. We built three working homepage studies to compare ways of explaining that idea.
Workbench: put the result beside the promise
The first direction pairs a direct headline with a live chart, model, and mathematical example. The visitor can try a component before reading its documentation. Source disclosures show the exact current component calls used by the page.
This is our recommended starting point. It explains what Alkemist does quickly and makes its scientific components visible. A follow-on section demonstrates possible researcher, research-group, and project compositions. Those layout presets are proposals; the independently installed starter currently provides one editable Astro site.
Fieldnotes: show the writing experience
The second direction introduces Alkemist through an example research note. Explanatory paragraphs, marginal annotations, and an interactive figure show how the finished work could feel to a reader. Ubuntu, handwritten notes, and the shared board surfaces carry the identity.
This direction gives the strongest editorial impression. It needs more reading before a visitor understands the reusable toolkit. Its article treatment and annotations are useful elements to carry into other pages.
Build together: make the first step concrete
The third direction leads with a brief to give a coding agent. Choosing Cloudflare, GitLab Pages, or a custom host changes the complete copied instructions. The short visible excerpt introduces the task; the full brief covers source access, installation, customization, hosting, and deployment evidence.
This direction makes setup approachable. Its working chart and model examples appear farther down the page, so it takes longer to demonstrate the scientific tools. It is a useful source for a compact setup section within Workbench.
Compare the work, then choose
The studies use the same installed components and the same synthetic data/model fixtures. Hidden figures keep their heavy engines idle until needed. The sine slider is a small site-owned widget beside an AlkMath equation; its source disclosure makes that distinction explicit.
The comparison page includes a preferred direction, a checklist of elements to retain, and optional notes. Choices stay in browser storage and can be copied or downloaded. They do not publish a homepage. We will compose the chosen direction from ordinary Astro sections, with user-owned content and shared updatable components.