Re: Thoughts about our website

[Riccardo Mottola]

HI Nikolaus,


H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:

> 
> I hadn't planned to jump into this discussion but after I looked at the
> haiku-os page I tend to agree that it is too cluttered.

I agree with you. Although the Haiku has a certain charme, it is too
cluttered to mee, it is has a developer taste. It would suit us perhaps
if we'd like to present ourself just for the library and tools but even
that is debatable.



>>  
>>
>> Well, I think this is very opinionated, even is the current dominating
>> opinion is that cluttering is bad.  Just compare with the world leader
>> of ecommerce: Amazon main web pages (home, search results and
>> product's page) are more than cluttered. The next ecommerce leaders do
>> the same : eBay, AliBaba, etc. they all build cluttered websites.
> 
> Yes, they do. From a marketing point of view there is to consider that
> everyone knows them. And they have their value. So customers (like me)
> must accept what they offer as home pages.

Of course it is opinionated, it is a very personal taste.

Amazon for me has a terrible page, crammed. They can get without because
they have a world-dominance position, but it looks cheap and also
suffers a similar issue "we are everything".. if they'd just sell books,
it would be easier, but they have deals, shipping video, music, whatever.


> 
> But would a newcomer be a competitor if they have a clean and consise
> page? No. Because everyone knows why they to go to them - they have an
> ACME approach. You can get everything from them (what a newcomer can't
> ever offer). And we simply use the search function.
> 
> The next thing is that e.g. Amazon doesn't develop anything So they do
> not have to report "News".

Only latest "deals".



> And here we are with the target group: I think GNUstep is looking for
> more than developers, free-software enthusiasts and technical guys but
> users.

But we also want to have a website for the end-user, we always stressed
that and I still agree on that. Otherwise we'd go to somehing like
gcc.gnu.org
There are successful project which don't even have a propwer website,
just a github or sourceforge page.


> 
> So is the discussing about content (structure, automation) or style
> (older or modern i.e. "sharp" vs. "soft")?
> 
> If we talk about content I'd say reactos and haiku are almost the same,
> qemu has a little less content for direct access.

Content and presentation. One thing is the "style" we are at the end
discussing both.
I'd, for now, keep a relatively terse style form bootstrap. Less icons.
It may be not latest design trend (it can be accommodated) where every
topic, title and section has a (useless) icon, but it is timeless and
needs less updating.
About content, we need to trade "front-up information" versus clarity.

Currently https://home.gnustep.org/ tries to have a short anticipation
of everything.
We can "dial down" and push certain things in second-tier.


Riccardo

PS: right now I give precedence to fix the last major issues so that w
e can go finally online, as we have the wiki.