[NGO] improving the plone.org site

Joel M. Bassuk Joel.Bassuk at oxfaminternational.org
Fri Jun 30 13:19:23 UTC 2006


great to see the discussion happening around this topic. there are lots of 
things that could be done better on the plone site from a design or 
marketing perspective... poco a poco.

in general, i find that, rightly or wrongly, plone suffers the stigma of 
being very non-(web) designer friendly. i have asked various plone 
developers to give me examples of nicely designed plone sites, so i can 
help diffuse this myth. maybe plone site could have a section to highlight 
such sites -- apol's if there is such a section already, i couldn't find 
it -- ok, after some searching around i found the list of sites using 
plone... suggest raising visibility of this page... or adding something on 
the home page for a featured site -- see for example "customer success" 
section on vignette.com (i.e. to feature a clean, smart site hand-picked 
by plone site editors, like www.rosettaproject.org or developer.ebay.com)

re home page
-- danny hope gives good tips: bullets and left-alignment are much easier 
to digest (also, aren't bullets more search engine friendly?).
-- great to see graphics (overall the site is extremely text heavy)
-- the column on the right-hand side of page: way too easy for it to get 
mistaken as a single column of News. it's nearly impossible to pick out 
that is in fact 4 separate section: news, latest releases (i'd recommend 
should be identified as "product" releases), events, and training.

re design in general
-- (taking a page from Drupal book) think about adding some color, to 
quickly visibly distinguish sections (see note on right-hand column of 
home pg above)
-- adding color to the different top-level navigation tabs might help also

re log-in
-- make it smaller, tighter, and put it in a fixed position, somewhere 
above the fold (again, see Drupal site)

N.B. i am not a designer (just been working on the web for +10 yrs)... 
just adding my 2p from a user perspective

Joel M. Bassuk
Oxfam International, Web Manager
www.oxfam.org

tel: +44 (0) 1865 339 130
fax: +44 (0) 1865 339 101
joel.bassuk at oxfaminternational.org


Visit the web site at http://www.oxfam.org
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