Hey Cabal,
Since the topic of the plugins page came up on gaim-devel, I figured
I'd bring this up. I think we've finally found someone to do the
pidgin.im website. I've been working on a list of things that suck
about http://gaim.sf.net/, and there are pretty much two things I
think suck far worse than anything else:
1) By far, the number one reason people visit gaim.sf.net is to
download Wingaim. There's no link to do this on gaim.sf.net/. People
either have to find "More Packages" in the header or "Download" in the
menu. Once they get there, they have to pick the right file out of 30.
This is no trivial task for a Windows user! I get asked "which one do
I download" ALL the time, and I've invented the phrase "like a Windows
user with a tarball," to refer to someone profoundly confused.
2) http://gaim.sf.net/ is entirely news-centric and nobody cares about
it. Even when "MSN Crashing" was the number one news item, tons of
people went to the webpage, clicked through to Contact Info, got my
screenname and IMed me to find out what was up.
Our current thought is to make the homepage much simpler:
- Name and logo.
- Big obvious download link, with an appropriate version shown to you
via user-agent check
- Smaller area for relatively unimportant news entries
- Big obvious alert area for the occasional really important news
entry (I'm thinking perhaps in the style of dialog-warning.png:
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/sean/dialogs2.png).
- Menu for everything else
We would then also have http://developer.pidgin.im where we could keep
all the nerd stuff.
Sidenote: Hylke's icons look great when scaled up to webpage sizes!
The logo guy is sending me the initial paperwork today and will get
started next week! The combination of a new logo and really great
vector icons should make for a great web design.
-s.
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