great to see the discussion happening around this topic. there are lots of things that could be done better on the plone site from a design or marketing perspective... poco a poco.
in general, i find that, rightly or wrongly, plone suffers the stigma of being very non-(web) designer friendly. i have asked various plone developers to give me examples of nicely designed plone sites, so i can help diffuse this myth. maybe plone site could have a section to highlight such sites -- apol's if there is such a section already, i couldn't find it -- ok, after some searching around i found the list of sites using plone... suggest raising visibility of this page... or adding something on the home page for a featured site -- see for example "customer success" section on vignette.com (i.e. to feature a clean, smart site hand-picked by plone site editors, like www.rosettaproject.org or developer.ebay.com)
re home page
-- danny hope gives good tips: bullets and left-alignment are much easier to digest (also, aren't bullets more search engine friendly?).
-- great to see graphics (overall the site is extremely text heavy)
-- the column on the right-hand side of page: way too easy for it to get mistaken as a single column of News. it's nearly impossible to pick out that is in fact 4 separate section: news, latest releases (i'd recommend should be identified as "product" releases), events, and training.
re design in general
-- (taking a page from Drupal book) think about adding some color, to quickly visibly distinguish sections (see note on right-hand column of home pg above)
-- adding color to the different top-level navigation tabs might help also
re log-in
-- make it smaller, tighter, and put it in a fixed position, somewhere above the fold (again, see Drupal site)
N.B. i am not a designer (just been working on the web for +10 yrs)... just adding my 2p from a user perspective
Joel M. Bassuk
Oxfam International, Web Manager
www.oxfam.org
tel: +44 (0) 1865 339 130
fax: +44 (0) 1865 339 101
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Visit the web site at http://www.oxfam.org
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