Website Redesign - Beta

Hello!

It looks very professional and clear. Excellent!

Best regards.

Wow, looks very good! I have nothing to add to the design/layout.

About the contents I have some comments:

1) Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots!

Immediately when somebody visits libreoffice.org to find out about
LibreOffice, they whould be presented with screenshots. In the
carousel the first image should include screenshots so that people get
a sense about what it would look like if they ran LibreOffice. When
features are presented and explained, they should have screenshots to
visualize the description.

2) Free - but why?

This is an old discussion, but free does not always communicate very
well. I rather use the term open, but if you want to emphasize the
American libertarian view and talk about Free/Freedom, the please add
some text below each "Free Office Suite" which explains "Why free?"
clarify the usual misunderstandings.

3) More facts, less marketing

For example the main page has a paragraph "LibreOffice comes with a
host of new features for its users as well as several important
changes and improvements under the hood." It looks very good and I
agree with the content, but in my experience people don't respond well
to this kind of argumentation even in a marketing context. Rather
mention a few features and deliver some facts of what LibreOffice
actually does. I know, writing short and good text is difficult..

4) Comparison to Microsoft Office

I noticed the absence of any mentions of "the competitor". Is there a
policy against it? I hope the marketing part of the site could some
how state that LibreOffice is as good as MS Office and it is in most
cases safe and sensible to switch. And if you need X, Y and Z, then
LibreOffice is even better. Take inspiration from
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:LibreOffice-_Microsoft_Office

5) If this is so good, how come nobody uses it?

Please add some list of famous users, e.g. the French Gendarmerie,
City of Münich, Ministry of Justice in Finland etc.. LibreOffice is
very popular, so show examples and figures. That should make people
more safe to make the switch.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Excelent.

Hello Olivier,

Hello Charles

Wherever possible, is there a process to help us in the translation of
the site? I mean specificaly the framework, because the content will
vary depending on the region/locale/community.

(I also concur to demand that the carrousel get a bit slower and the
color fonts contrast better with the bakground)

On the colour fonts we are indeed monitoring this with Eleonora; one
part of the solution is in the placement of the text and on the size of
the fonts, not just the colour. So stay tuned on this, we might
actually ask the lists for input when we modify it.

You ask a good question about localization, I'm not sure I will fully
answer it though, so feel free to ask more :slight_smile:

- the site is powered by Silverstripe 3.0, which is the most recent
  stable version of Silverstripe. Most of what we did (text, graphical
  elements) is put in graphical elements and blocks (menus, etc. ) or
  is text on a page. Other graphical elements are icons and you can of
  course entirely reuse them.

I'm sure I'm not answering you in an accurate way because I've never
localized a website using a l10n tool...

Best,

Charles.

> http://newdesign.libreoffice.org

Wow, looks very good! I have nothing to add to the design/layout.

About the contents I have some comments:

1) Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots!

Immediately when somebody visits libreoffice.org to find out about
LibreOffice, they whould be presented with screenshots. In the
carousel the first image should include screenshots so that people get
a sense about what it would look like if they ran LibreOffice. When
features are presented and explained, they should have screenshots to
visualize the description.

No. And by the way, have you checked out the website for Microsoft
Office or Mozilla? Because there are either no screenshots, or they are
stuck somewhere in a back menu.

2) Free - but why?

This is an old discussion, but free does not always communicate very
well. I rather use the term open, but if you want to emphasize the
American libertarian view and talk about Free/Freedom, the please add
some text below each "Free Office Suite" which explains "Why free?"
clarify the usual misunderstandings.

Sorry about that, in fact, that text will be entirely scraped out and
replaced by something completely different. The only "Free" you should
see is in the trilogy: Free Office Suite, Fantastic People, Fun project.

3) More facts, less marketing

For example the main page has a paragraph "LibreOffice comes with a
host of new features for its users as well as several important
changes and improvements under the hood." It looks very good and I
agree with the content, but in my experience people don't respond well
to this kind of argumentation even in a marketing context. Rather
mention a few features and deliver some facts of what LibreOffice
actually does. I know, writing short and good text is difficult..

This portion can of course be changed. But if anything, we should do
ten times more marketing, and less facts. We are getting bored to hell
with facts. People don't care about facts; they want something fun they
can use and understand as fast as possible. They also want to be part
of something, like a community, and they want meaning. Facts in place
of marketing could kill Free Software, I could swear it.

4) Comparison to Microsoft Office

I noticed the absence of any mentions of "the competitor". Is there a
policy against it? I hope the marketing part of the site could some
how state that LibreOffice is as good as MS Office and it is in most
cases safe and sensible to switch. And if you need X, Y and Z, then
LibreOffice is even better. Take inspiration from
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:LibreOffice-_Microsoft_Office

In fact, this page is already linked in the Discover section. For
various reasons (part of them legal, part of them related to messaging)
I don't feel comfortable putting out such a list staight on the
website, however, we *do* link to it.

5) If this is so good, how come nobody uses it?

Please add some list of famous users, e.g. the French Gendarmerie,
City of Münich, Ministry of Justice in Finland etc.. LibreOffice is
very popular, so show examples and figures. That should make people
more safe to make the switch.

Very good point. I cannot promise such a page for next week, but we
definitely should have a catchy page with such testimonials. At least
we can do better than the Awards Page (About Us > Awards)

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Thanks!

I have to agree, the new site looks superb!

One little nit-pick/request:
The banner on http://newdesign.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ is a
bit daunting to look at if you are looking for ways to join.

Maybe we can replace that with header sections for each field (like in
http://newdesign.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/)?
That way we give people who would like to join a good overview of what they
can do (in addition to the menu itself).

Thanks,
Philipp

I have to agree, the new site looks superb!

One little nit-pick/request:
The banner on
http://newdesign.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/ is a bit
daunting to look at if you are looking for ways to join.

Oh... don't pay attention to this page now, nothing's really in place
and these are not the pictures you are looking for :slight_smile:

Maybe we can replace that with header sections for each field (like in
http://newdesign.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/)?
That way we give people who would like to join a good overview of
what they can do (in addition to the menu itself).

We actually have other, dedicated images so stay tuned :slight_smile:

Best,

Charles.

Perhaps so, but IMO the vast majority of our users and potential users have
no interest in "community" or "meaning" or even "fun" -- they just want a
great product that does what they want or need to do, and therefore they
want facts.

Obviously we see the world of software quite differently. (This may well be
a generational thing, at least partly.) Your emphasis is on the production
side; my interest and emphasis is on the consumption (user) side.

--Jean

Hello Jean,

>
> ... if anything, we should do
> ten times more marketing, and less facts. We are getting bored to
> hell with facts. People don't care about facts; they want something
> fun they can use and understand as fast as possible. They also want
> to be part of something, like a community, and they want meaning.
> Facts in place of marketing could kill Free Software, I could swear
> it.
>
>
Perhaps so, but IMO the vast majority of our users and potential
users have no interest in "community" or "meaning" or even "fun" --
they just want a great product that does what they want or need to
do, and therefore they want facts.

Obviously we see the world of software quite differently. (This may
well be a generational thing, at least partly.) Your emphasis is on
the production side; my interest and emphasis is on the consumption
(user) side.

Actually I don't believe we have that of a different view. We see the
same issues from two different vantage points. It's not an either/or
thing; you focus on the consuming side - we tried to improve that by
orders of magnitude by getting rid of pages of text no one reads and
make it simpler to grasp the idea - but we do have another specific
objective, which is to improve and grow the community. In this sense
the redesign has to meet these two goals.

best,

Charles.

Hi,

Site looks pretty nice. Thanks for your work and sorry for late (no)
feedback from me :frowning:
I strongly agree with Otto regarding to items 1 and 4.

21 Oca 2014 15:24 tarihinde "Otto Kekäläinen" <otto@seravo.fi> yazdı:
Hi

> http://newdesign.libreoffice.org
1) Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots!

Please put some clear, shiny and fancy screenshots. And trying to explains
features with images is very easy and effective.

What is Calc? Question can be answered as equivalent of Excel but it won't
satisfy only users sees similarity with UI. Visualization of Charts, pivot
tables, filters and functions gived them confidence. The thing is that LO
is an office suite and not the one that people introduced first.

Also look iwork site of Apple. Beautiful screenshots, great look of sample
works gives the feeling that oh that's cool and i can make them easily.
Impressive

4) Comparison to Microsoft Office

This should be in the website. The question "can it open ms office files"
is still the number 1.

Having a main comparison table will help much.

Best regards,
Hope to have much time in near future

1) Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots!

Immediately when somebody visits libreoffice.org to find out about
LibreOffice, they whould be presented with screenshots. In the
carousel the first image should include screenshots so that people get
a sense about what it would look like if they ran LibreOffice. When
features are presented and explained, they should have screenshots to
visualize the description.

No. And by the way, have you checked out the website for Microsoft
Office or Mozilla? Because there are either no screenshots, or they are
stuck somewhere in a back menu.

We'll lots of other examples like Skype, Photoshop, VLC and Blender
have screenshots on either directly on front page or on a prominent
Features or About page.

[...]

3) More facts, less marketing

For example the main page has a paragraph "LibreOffice comes with a
host of new features for its users as well as several important
changes and improvements under the hood." It looks very good and I
agree with the content, but in my experience people don't respond well
to this kind of argumentation even in a marketing context. Rather
mention a few features and deliver some facts of what LibreOffice
actually does. I know, writing short and good text is difficult..

This portion can of course be changed. But if anything, we should do
ten times more marketing, and less facts. We are getting bored to hell
with facts. People don't care about facts; they want something fun they
can use and understand as fast as possible. They also want to be part
of something, like a community, and they want meaning. Facts in place
of marketing could kill Free Software, I could swear it.

Ok, maybe the term "less marketing" was a bad choice of words. I mean
less fluff and more fact-based and convincing marketing. A very good
example is http://www.blender.org/features/ which displays screenshots
and facts (written with good marketing point of view). If MS Office
users would read a similar page about LibreOffice they'd realize it is
actully very feature full and the UI looks familiar and easy to use.

- Otto

Hello!

http://newdesign.libreoffice.org

What is the status with this? The subdomain does not work anymore and the
new design is not in use at the main site.

Hello,

What is the status with this? The subdomain does not work anymore and the
new design is not in use at the main site.

as for the subdomain, we are right now migrating a few VMs to a new machine due to capacity and load problems - the VM where the new website is in still needs to be migrated, Gerrit and AskBot had a higher priority as they are production systems.

@Cloph, Alex: Any ETA on when the new VM will be available?

As for the website itself,there are still some pieces missing, mostly the download page, which were not yet delivered. We are setting up a confcall next week to find a way to finalize those pieces.

Florian

Hi Florian, *,

What is the status with this? The subdomain does not work anymore and the
new design is not in use at the main site.

@Cloph, Alex: Any ETA on when the new VM will be available?

Sorry for not announcing it here - it is currently available using the
ip 144.76.139.236

so if you add the following to your /etc/hosts you can see it
144.76.139.236 newdesign.libreoffice.org

ciao
Christian

Hi,

Sorry for not announcing it here - it is currently available using the
ip 144.76.139.236

any objections that I change the DNS entry? :slight_smile:

Florian

Not at all. Perhaps "staging.libreoffice.org" might be better :slight_smile:

Best,
Charles.

Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org> a écrit :

I have updated the DNS entry now.

Is this the final revision?

Chris

Hi,

Is this the final revision?

we're finalizing the site for the moment, so what you see is pretty much the final setting, besides a few glitches we're fixing right now :slight_smile:

Florian

On what is the site built on? Is it a CMS?