[mythtv] Official Thread: Mythtv.org Redesign

[Jean-Philippe Steinmetz]

I wanted to put a couple of my cents in here as I have pretty considerable
experience in this department. I've been following along this post for a
while now. I think some good progress has been made but I have come to two
simple conclusions.

First is that the current mythtv.org design and all these proposed designs,
while all good, are very corporate. I'm not entirely sure what kind of look
everyone is going for but if its a cookie cutter corporate identity you're
going for then you're definitely on the right track. Personally I disagree
with this trend. I think MythTV should have a hip and edgy look. Something
that should grab at you in a kind of "cool!' fashion the way the actual
application does. MythTV is a pretty sweet app and it should come across
that way. Then theres the slogan itself, which calls MythTV "homebrew", but
with the look you're going for its almost an oxymoron. It's not homebrew at
all. Thats not to say the site shouldn't have class. You can have plenty of
edge with a sense of class. I'll try and pull together some links of sites
that fall under the style i'm thinking of.

Second is that mythtv.org needs a serious content overhaul. My girlfriend,
who is decently computer saavy as she is the product of two computer
scientists but not a techie by yours or my standards, looked at the current
website the other day and the one thing she said to me was "I couldn't
figure out what exactly mythtv is... what is it?" This is a big problem. If
random visitors can't figure out what it is the user base will never grow.
This comes straight down to organization of content. The home page for the
project should not contain the development news information. New visitors
are not going to care what the latest status of the project is they are
going to care about three things and three things only. 1) What is MythTV?
2) 2) Where do I get MythTV? and 3) How do I set it up? Last night I visited
the Pidgin website. This is another one that has needed some work done to it
and their recent overhaul has left me rather impressed. Its clean, simple to
navigate and straight to the point. You don't have to wade through pages of
bs to get to the vital info that new and current users want. Most
importantly it doesn't require a degree in comp sci to read through either.
Looking at the proposed site structure, while it is an improvement, makes me
a little worried in this regard as it retains a lot of the same elements of
the current design. Many of the proposed sections are redundant and can be
condensed. So here's what I would like to suggest as navigation for a new
mythtv.org site.

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