front page thoughts

[Mark Linimon]

On 2 Apr 2004, Adam Weinberger wrote:
> The front page is _really_ cluttered. The page is so busy that it's
> difficult to find things on it unless you already know where they are.
> There's a lot of stuff on there that doesn't need to be on the very
> front page.

Several folks (including myself) have kind of a back-burner project
to slowly restructure the web pages by creating more 'second-level'
pages, each of which would pull some links for the front page but
also some links from the more detailed pages.  In other words, making
the hierarchy look more like:

start here
   an overview of one area
      specific details about that area
      more specific details about that area
   an overview of another area
      specific details about that area

and so forth.

The devil, of course, is in the details.  Even more so than most
subprojects within FreeBSD, this one is really driven by community
consensus.

> Why not consider separating the links from the front page into sections
> keyed to various groups: New Users, Current Users, and Developers?

Well, generate a hierarchy (as above) of what you think it ought to
look like, and let's see what people think.

> FreeBSD's website looks very old. It uses a colour and design layout
> that is not popular anymore. Cleaning up the front page and minimizing
> the clutter would do a lot to make the site seem more professional,
> accessible, and well-maintained.

As a summary of past iterations over this topic ... some people have
really strong opinions on the 'look-and-feel' issues.  (Ob. disclaimer:
I am not one of them, which anyone who has ever looked at a web page
that I "designed" can aptly testify :-) )  But when the discussion of
style changes and content changes overlap, it seems that everyone gets
very distracted with the former, and the latter discussion tends to
get shunted aside.

So my _personal_ advice on this issue would be to keep the two issues
as separate as possible, and also to aim for incremental changes rather
than the Big Redesign, at least at first.

All that being said, my guess is that a plurality of people would
say that, yeah, the page is pretty cluttered.  It's how to "get there
from here" that's the hard work ...

mcl