Image can be everything

October 10, 2003 | View Comments (11) | Category: Our Thoughts

Summary: Great idea. Great software. Horrible website.

I love open source software. I love the idea of open source software. I love to use open source software. I hate looking at open source sites. I came across this new project via Slashdot. The idea is brilliant and I am sure they will get many geeks to try the project. The site sucks.

Firebird is a great browser to use and recommend. It is not hard to convince someone to give it a try once they see it in action. However, I have a problem telling people to go their site and download it. I admit the site is not all that bad, but it definitely was not meant for new users.

Open source is full of wonderful ideas produced by brilliant people. However, it seems none of them are brilliant designers. To many people, presentation is everything. Even this article at Boxes and Arrows proves that point. Open source developers need to understand that geeks will use their software no matter how ugly their sites are, but we are not the majority (ummm, yeah so I admitted I am geek, so what?). To get the general population to use the software a good step would be to produce an aesthetically pleasing site that is easy to use.

Besides doing pro-bono work for non-profits to develop your portfolio, you could also redesign a site for an open source project. These sites usually only contain a couple of pages anyways so it should not take that long and too be honest it is hard to do any worse then what most of them already have.

When recommending people to check out Linux I definitely do not want to send them to the official site because they will more than likely run away scared. If you are not that technical, but wish to contribute to the open source cause then this is a great way to help out. If you are someone trying to pitch your product or service remember that first impressions do matter and the majority of the time these occur on your website.

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Comments

#1

>> Besides doing pro-bono work for non-profits to develop your portfolio, you could also redesign a site for an open source project.

Amen to that! Now if only more web designers could think like you...

Cheah Chu Yeow (http://blog.codefront.net/)

#2

The reason that the design for most open source sites is less than steller is because the people who work on open source projects aren't designers, they're coders. For me, at least, I love to write code, but I don't really love to write HTML. I can imagine that something similar happens for most open source projects.

milbertus (http://www.milbertus.com)

#3

I agree, but don't you also think that they code because they want others to use their software? That is part of the programmer's ego I believe. I think that a nice, usable website would do a long way to encourage people to try their software.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#4

Yes, coders code because they want people use use their software (on some level, at least).

Coders' web sites aren't clear and usable for the same reason coders' software isn't necessarily clear and usable -- they can understand their unintuitive, clunky interfaces, so they expect others can too.

It's a sort of false-consensus effect, really.

A nice web site might help, but the coder doesn't see the problem at all.

flexiblefine

#5

It's not only that the developer may not see any problems with the web site and documentation, he may not know what to do about the problem. I know for little apps that I write, I think that the documentation is good enough, but I usually get questions about how to perform tasks that I thought were simple to do, but evidentally aren't for the common user. I'm not very good at writing documentation, so there isn't much that I can do to make the doc better. Sure, I try to make the doc better each time, but I'm sure that there are others out there who are much better doc writers and designers than I am.

milbertus (http://www.milbertus.com)

#6

As a general rule, coders and designers are very different people. Very few coders make good designers, very few designers make good coders. That's why there's so much emphasis on seperating form from function in coding... the coder doesnt' care what it looks like, the designer doesn't care what's behind the scenes as long as it works.

People who can do both aren't common. And even among them, one side or the other is usually favored.

You seem to favor the design side more. I'd rather be coding. :-)

JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#7

One of the most decent open source sites I've seen:
http://phpadsnew.com/two/index.html

Taylor (http://gtmcknight.com)

#8

That is a pretty nice site. It looks like they have their act together. Thanks for the link Taylor.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#9

What about when the open source software is one where the website is the software?

While I can't have an influence on every OSS, I'm trying where I can:
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/tordona/

Terence Ordona

#10

For those sorts of things, terence, you just wait. If the software's going to succeed, it will quickly end up being templated and have a hundred million languages available and people will do nice looking templates to go along with the cruddy ones the original developers came up with.

Heck, look at PHP Nuke. I remember when it first came out... talk about ugly. Now there are a variety of nice looking templates for it. Of course, you're still stuck wth the basic format of the site, but that's simply a design that works well for portals.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#11

Ahh, php-nuke...I built my first dynamic site using that thing...and I do mean THING.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

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