Good (in my opinion) examples for websites of open-source projects are:
They are OK but not exceptionally good. Suse and PostgreSQL are already too messy for a casual visitor.
On the other hand, those are well-known projects and many people already know what they are when they visit the pages.
Lazarus project is less fortunate. It is almost unknown. Hence the main purpose of the project main page is to attract casual visitors who don't know anything about this project.
First the visitor wants to know what this page is about. There must a clear, short explanation: "Lazarus is ...".
Second, if the visitor is still interested in this newly found SW, he obviously wants to try it. So, there must be an easy and obvious way to install the SW.
Any other information can be behind links. For the first time visitor they have secondary importance.
Experienced users already know which sub-page they want and the main page is not important for them.
For example I don't use Lazarus main page. I go directly to forum, bug-tracker and Wiki.
I have used 2 sites as good examples that fulfill those requirements. I copy them here, too.
1. Our competition
http://monodevelop.com/There is first a big download button and then a clear explanation:
"MonoDevelop is a ..."
Almost perfect.
2.
http://www.teamviewer.com/Commercial SW but they have a free version to attract people.
The download page even recognizes the client OS using JavaScript and offers the right download by default. Cool.
To return to the point regarding the forum: You are right, a Pascal-based solution would be preferable. ...
I don't know why people suggest this kind of things when there is even no forum SW made with Pascal.
The right way would be to start such a project, maybe build it on top of Brooks, and when it is ready after few years, then discuss about using it for Lazarus forum.
Regards,
Juha