Re: GNUstep.org website redesign proposal

[Markus Hitter]

Am 02.01.2014 22:05, schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald:
> 
> On 2 Jan 2014, at 20:27, Gregory Casamento
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> I disagree with Riccardo here in the sense that the current look
>> is not "proven" at all.   What needs to happen is a radical
>> redesign of the site and an entirely new way of presenting the
>> information on it.
> 
> I agree with this ... current design is not proven (and while
> radical redesign may not be necessary, it seems worth trying).
> 
>> I hate to sound like a business person, but our recent discussion 
>> on the list with Doc O'Leary did yield a few unpleasant 
>> revelations.    One of which is that our message is entirely 
>> confusing and that the website is a big part of that.

I think the Wine project has a somewhat similar audience and similar
development targets as GNUstep. Their website is always very mature and
clean:

http://www.winehq.org/

You see: just one sentence about what the project is, then a couple of
links which easily fit into the smallest screen. If somebody wants to
learn about details, he'll happily click through a few links.

If GNUstep can't explain what it is in a single sentence ... then that's
a problem. On the PPA page I currently use this:

> GNUstep is a free implementation of Apples Cocoa (Foundation,
> AppKit, etc.) coming along with many additions, like WebObjects, and
> is written in (of course) Objective-C. It is known to work on Linux, 
> *BSD, MS Windows and also (using Apples own libraries) on Mac OS X. 
> Extending support to iOS' UIKit appears to be not impossible.

For my taste not perfect, but reasonable.

- - -
> If there's one thing I've learned about business/marketing,  it's 
> that people tend to screw up by taking complaints too seriously. When
> you change to address complaints it's all too easy to make things
> worse by losing the things a majority like in order to deal with the
> criticism of a noisy minority.

This partly matches my experience. You screw up easily if you do exactly
what these people suggest. Still they point out a problem and you should
have addressed this problem; their way or another way.


Markus

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