The Website

Chris Dillon cdillon at wolves.k12.mo.us
Tue Mar 30 11:11:52 PST 2004


On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, John Von Essen wrote:

> And... It doesn't help when they go to freebsd.org. It makes FreeBSD
> seem NON-enterprise. Personally, i think the site is fine, but Im a
> tech, not a CTO. Maybe, freebsd.com can be redesigned have a
> suse.com or redhat.com look-n-feel, and freebsd.org can retain - the
> developer community look-n-feel.

Having two different web sites is unnecessary work.  It is entirely
possible to have a tech-friendly site that looks good enough to
visually impress the CEO/CTO/etc.  What techie people such as myself
care about is the availability of and how easy it is to find the
technical information we've come to the site looking for:
documentation, FAQs, Knowledge Base, software downloads/patches, and
so on... The FreeBSD site already does this fairly well except for the
lack of a decent search engine.

I will sometimes judge a product based on the quality of the technical
information available for it on the official website.  If the web site
is devoid of any useful information, no matter how good it looks I'm
likely to brush it off and go look for something else.  If I can find
what I want _and_ the site looks spiffy at the same time, that's extra
brownie points and makes the product that much more impressive in my
eyes.  Take m0n0wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall) for example.  I was
impressed when I saw the non-typical (for open source), clean and
professional web page that told me everything I wanted to know about
what it is, what it does, what they've been doing lately, etc., and
then blown away by the product itself.  It's no SuSE or RedHat site,
but its good in its own way.  That's a win-win scenario in my book.
:-)

That said, the FreeBSD website really isn't that bad.  It could stand
a facelift now and then to keep things buzzing, but don't sacrifice
its usability.

-- 
 Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us
 FreeBSD: The fastest, most open, and most stable OS on the planet
 - Available for IA32, IA64, AMD64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures
 - PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development
 - http://www.freebsd.org

Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon?



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