RE: Reworked Website?

[Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>]

On So, 2005-09-25 at 18:07 +1000, Hugh Buzacott wrote:

> To get an idea of what it would look like please have a look at
> www.geocities.com/bzctt/ or have a look at the marketing team's
> website wiki.

Ok, I hope you are not too offended by what I am going to write, but I
guess it's better to comment now than later.

Firstly, looking at the site I believe that some very useful marketing
considerations seem not to have been taken into account. In particular,
I noticed the following:

(1)
The website has no clear message. It is packed with lots of text and the
actual navigation is put into the background. One reason is probably
that text-only, top-aligned links are often used as external links to
other sites (look at how the OSDN sites are linked with each other,
Sourceforge for example).

(2)
In Barry Rosenberg's "Spring into technical writing" there is a very
impressive demonstration. The book has one page where a picture is
randomly placed on the bottom. The picture is captioned:

"This picture is totally off topic, but you looked at it before you read
the opening paragraph, simply because it's a picture."

And that is exactly what happened. This makes photos the perfect place
for getting your message out.
A professional "teaser" photo would thus be strategically smart. Compare
that to the Apple and Microsoft homepages - when opening those pages,
the teaser immediately catches your full attention. It also has a short,
pregnant message that they are trying to get out without requiring you
to read a lot.

While we do have only very limited access to professional studio
photography, there are some very talented photographers in the GNOME
community. Garret LeSage's linuxart.com is one example - his photos are
quite good enough for a professional website. (Using his photos, I
hacked this together: http://debain.org/stuff/gnomeorg.png . I know that
the 2.14 splash sucks amongst other things, this is only to demonstrate
that photos *can* make a website look more exiting.)

(3)
The choice of colours has a strong effect on the first impression a user
gets from a website. Studies about the effect of different colours on
users exist. For example: One study, done for the German police, showed
a clear trend that blue and white are perceived as "trustworthy".
Following this, the police was going to replace all of their (currently
green) uniforms by blue ones and also start to replace the green-white
cars by blue-white ones. I have searched for the study for quite a
while, but unfortunately have not found it anymore. However, Wikipedia
still has some information on the effect of different colors for those
interested.
Also, again we can learn from those who most certainly have done such
studies for their products, by looking at Microsoft's and Apple's
websites and their default desktops. In any case, you will notice a
strong use of blue can see that they have chosen blue and white, and so
did they for their desktop backgrounds. In fact, while looking at major
corporation's websites for this post, I had trouble finding one single
website that did not seem to follow the same guideline: ibm.com,
att.com, microsoft.com, apple.com, juniper.net, dell.com... the only two
exceptions that I found are hp.com and cisco.com, noth of which use
green. Wherever you look at, the same guidelines colour-wise.


The above points are my humble opinion, though I am trying to base them
on comprehensible facts. I hope you don't take them the wrong way, it's
just that I would like to see a great gnome.org website as much as you
do.

-Samuel