I agree with Chris. Two key design elements that look particularly retro (or even immature) on the new zope.com site are: 1. Setting the link hover to "bolder" for many of the site's links. Visual interactivity with the user is a very important design element, but overly stimulating the user is bad, very bad. I'd recommend using FireFox to view the site, but as soon as you get there, right click and hit Edit CSS. In the edit box, near the top, find the following lines... a:hover{ text-decoration: underline; font-weight: bolder; } ...and as quickly as possible, change it so that only underlining takes place when you hover over a link... a:hover{ text-decoration: underline; font-weight: none; } You'll find the remainder of your browsing the site much more pleasant. This is only a start, of course. 2. The cheesy, shrunken look of the icons taking you to each of the main product lines from the home page. Granted, they look better when you see each one up close at its native size... but there's nothing sacred about using them shrunken to one third size for the front page. They simply do not readily convey to the visitor what that icon will take you to, nor who should be going there. In general, icons and buttons should talk to us, either pointing to the content within or to the audience desired. This is not happening here. For example, Zope4Edu has the SuperZ superimposed on some old book covers, which look actually more like a library, even a law library, than a clear academic reference. An approach that might work nicely here would be a "mortarboard" hat motif -- a fairly universal symbol for higher education, that would match both content and audience. Perhaps it could be jauntily placed atop the SuperZ trademark. Zope4Intranets -- a spiderweb? The oldest web metaphor we have? Ugh. Zope Managed Hosting -- the shrunken servers are unrecognizable on my monitor. 3. I know I said two, but there are three key design flaws. Number three is to always have a very clear "Call To Action" on the site and make it impossibly easy to take that Action. In this case, the only call to action are a series of mailto links. Why not a simple Contact Form? Use a miniscule fraction of the power of Zope to place the Contact Form link in the footer (and in a border) of each page, and have it customized so that if you click on the form it will tell Zope Corp where you were surfing when you clicked on it? Better, it may contain cookie information about you, so that someone in marketing can correlate your contact message back to (1) your entry page to the site, (2) the referring link that brought you here, and (3) the pattern of surfing that you did on the site before hitting the contact form. All to see if the new site design is performing adequately, or even as expected. I can't compare to the old site... didn't visit often enough to remember. I didn't see anything broken, so that's good. Love the product, and would consider hiring Zope for services, but not for site design. =Paul At 12:00 AM 5/8/2004 +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
Hadar Pedhazur wrote:
A week ago, http://www.zope.com/ received a significant facelift. In addition, some of the previous pages were available in PDF format only, and the entire site is now HTML, and therefore more easily searchable as well.
In all honestly, I prefered the old site visually. The rollover menus and font-size-changing left menu link hovers are particularly nasty :-S
Still, maybe that's just my personal opinion? Besides, I'm hardly one to talk given the state of my own company website ;-)
Chris . o O ( hey, mine looks good on WAP phones :-P )
-- Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk