FreeBSD's Visual Identity: Outdated?

[Morten Liebach]

On 2004-12-28 10:47:12 -0800, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg wrote this message on Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 01:57 +0100:
> > >Aesthetics are not everything, the web site does what its supposed to
> > >do. Also i actually like how it looks.
> > >A lot of people have strong feelings about all these all singing all
> > >dancing webistes. There is just no need. Keep it simple and easy to
> > >navigate around thats all thats really important. If the aesthetics
> > >really matter more than function to such people who use BSD then they
> > >would probably be not using BSD but either windows or linux, where you
> > >have a nice pretty GUI to look at all the nice pretty sites.
> > 
> > This is where I think a lot of people simply does not understand the 
> > problem.
> > Im a FreeBSD user. I like FreeBSD because it does not have all the 
> > flashy installers and pretty GUI's that many linux distros seems to 
> > have today. But still, Ive been screaming for years for someone to 
> > improve the website. Why?
> > Anyone that has stood in front of a boardroom full of CEO's or similar 
> > and tried to promote the use of FreeBSD in a big organisation knows 
> > why. They might like all the facts about the os, the rock-solid 
> > stability, the lightning-fast performance and its solid reputation as 
> > a server os, but one look at the website and they will run screaming 
> > towards the nearest linux advocate instead.
> > We, the users, might not care about our image, but if we want to be 
> > taken seriously by the rest of the world we better do something about it!
> > 
> > [snip]
> > >>4. There should be some kind of FreeBSD business card and letterhead
> > >>  available to all that support this project.
> > >
> > >
> > >I have to ask why? why would people need such things? that i just dont
> > >understand
> > 
> > Clearly, you have not tried to "sell" FreeBSD to a big corporation.
> 
> Then we should create a website www.freebsdforcxo.com and use that.
> The problem is that the base FreeBSD.org website should remain as it
> is.  It is targeted to technical people who might not be running a GUI
> web browser and want quick access to information.
> 
> Making it more pretty to sell, while destroying the usability for 99%
> of the audience is not a solution.

Try looking at http://csszengarden.com/ in lynx, links or w3m, then try
firefox/mozilla, opera, konqueror/ssafari or MSIE.  Perfectly usable for
all, and easy to make with a CSS based site.

As someone remarked earlier there's work ongoing to CSS-ify the site
even more, and it will be for the better in all respects, both usability
and the "flashiness" that is somewhat missing.

Have a nice day
                                 Morten

-- 
http://m.mongers.org/weblog/
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