Makeovers Coming for Drupal.com and Mozilla.org
March 17, 2009
From OStatic blogs
In a recent post titled "Does Open Source Need Better Evangelists?" I noted that many open source project leaders neglect to promote and market their offerings as effectively as proprietary software purveyors do. Of course, ask most skilled marketers behind successful proprietary software products how important it is to have a 21st century, good looking, informative web site, and they’ll say that it’s plenty important. That’s why it’s good to see both the Drupal.com and Mozilla.org sites getting their dowdy home pages and sites ready for makeovers. Here’s what some of the proposed makeovers look like.
As Drupal founder Dries Buytaert notes in this post, Drupal.com is getting over 1,000 unique visitors "on a good day" and is in need of a facelift. Dries approached some developer friends and had them create better looking and more effective mock-ups for Drupal.com, with one of them seen here:
The mock-up emphasizes lots of visuals, and not just a sea of text, and note that it’s intended for Drupal.com–the commercial web face of the Drupal project–and not the Drupal.org site. "I’m confident that the new design will help promote the project," says Dries, and more open source project leaders would be wise to upgrade their web presentability as well.
Meanwhile, Mozilla reports here that "the Mozilla Foundation, along with Happy Cog and the wider Mozilla community, is hard at work redesigning both the look + feel and content on the Mozilla.org website." This post discusses how insiders at Mozilla don’t feel that the Mozilla.org site is telling the right story, and this post includes "Round 1" redesign concepts. Here is one mock-up:
It looks like Mozilla is looking beyond just graphical oomph and focusing on messaging. "Open source is better," and "we’re a global community of thousands." From retail companies to blogs to open source projects, it matters to put a good web face forward. One of my favorite places to look around for good open source utilities and applications is TinyApps.org. Do you think its web site could use a little sprucing up though?
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