New Rosegarden Website

The Current Rosegarden Website - How do I hate thee? Let me count...

  1. Terribly dated.
  2. Ugly frames layout.
  3. Ugly fonts. Really ugly fonts.
  4. Too many pages.
  5. A "news" feed?
  6. How many clicks does it take to find the sourceforge and wiki links? Too many!

Everything that was wrong with the web back then is here.

Muse - Our open source competitor. Haven't evaluated this. Just dumping it here for reference.

Ardour - Open Source digital audio workstation. Front page is pretty good, but way too wordy for my tastes. Get to the point. Where do I download? Where do I contribute? That should all be on page one, not on other pages that don't look like they belong to the site.

Logic - Commercial competitor. A little company called Apple. Front page looks nice, but boy are they full of themselves! Blah Blah Blah, don't care!

REAPER - Another competitor. Succinct.

Steinberg - Yet another competitor. Slideshow. Slideshows make me cringe. They give me motion sickness.

Thoughts

It sure would be nice if our site looked better. More like the references. Especially on phones which are all the rage these days, I hear. Note the propensity toward black for music software websites. Black is beautiful.

I think the focus of the site's main page should be on:

The basics should be on the first page, with maybe a link to another page with more info.

We'll likely need to at the very least preserve the two annoying ads that appear on the page. Hmmm, the google ad is gone. Ok, the one ad. The one about "Special thanks to AOE - the open web company, a global Magento Agentur & leading Open Source web solutions provider, for their generous sponsorship of Rosegarden development!" I have no idea whether that's even valid anymore.

While I don't recommend it, if you'd like to pull down the old website from svn, it's here: https://sourceforge.net/p/rosegarden/code/HEAD/tree/website/