I agree with Joel in a lot of respects, and it's great to hear the
perspective of someone who may not be immersed in Plone and who may not
use that site everyday. Developers think, 'Hey, I don't see any problem
- I can always find what I'm looking for on Plone.org', but potential
implementors/clients/managers do not have that initial reaction.
This topic may be meant more for the Plone Marketing list (where it has
been sliced and diced before), but since the NGO list has more
client/user interaction (or hopefully will), I'll follow onto this thread.
When we had a break-out session at the 2005 Plone Symposium in New
Orleans, we had a small group that focused on what the Plone.net site
would look like (and that site looks nice, but since everyone is busy,
doesn't seem to keep moving at a great pace.) I still think that
Plone.net is probably the place for the prospect/manager to go to find
out about Plone, but that Plone.org shouldn't freak-out a non-techie at
first glance. It should have more of a basic look to the site that
techies may appreciate, while directing NGO/business users who are just
checking out Plone to the proper resource (which I think will be
Plone.net, if we continue on the path of one site for marketing and one
for the developer community.)
When we had this break-out session in 2005 (as we do at most
conferences), I said it then and will say it again. I think that the
site for the ezPublish CMS has about the perfect site organization that
Plone.net and Plone.org should learn from. Light use of graphics, easy
navigation to find clients, case studies, consultants, features sets,
etc. And the site for the typo3 CMS does very well also.
I think that Plone.net is headed in this direction, but in the time it
takes to get that site built out, the Plone world is losing users such
as Greenpeace UK to what are in some cases inferior products due to a)
marketing/message clarity and b) concerted efforts by consultants acting
as community to get big wins for the platform (whether they end up
directly benefiting with services work for that client or not.)
You can check out the ezPublish and typo3 CMS sites here.
http://ez.no
http://www.typo3.com
I agree with Joel that the Drupal site does a decent job of dressing up
a bit with light graphics, but it's still a bit busy. It has more of a
blog feel to it, more of a community development site feel (as
Plone.org), and I think still misses a bit on the clear marketing
message, unless on your initial visit you actually read the content on
the home page and find the links to screenshots, features, etc. I just
think those links are much easier found instantly on the other two sites
I mention, and their design is more polished and professional, yet clean
and simple.
A lot of folks don't even know about the Plone.net site, so I thought
I'd mention that this is in the works before everyone starts designing
the Plone.org site in a way that overlaps too much with that effort.
The thought is that there is still a need for more of a development site
- that plone.org will hopefully direct the right people to .net, but
keep the developers from pulling hair out from not being able to get to
the kind of content they have grown accustomed to getting on the .org site.
I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds on this, Paul E. and others who
are on this list and others - just correct me if I'm wrong. No hard
feelings, but this was my understanding of where the Plone site(s)
direction.
-Ken Wasetis
Contextual Corp.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Joel M. Bassuk wrote:
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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