Informative Homepage

[Surrender]

Hello,

i just thought about the future of the old website which is running on bitcraze.se.

It will be much more informative and it will magnetize people when the homepage is not a blog but a usual website with introduction etc.
My idea is to create a new one with the open source CMS Joomla! 3. Link: http://www.joomla.org/

On the main page there is the crazyflie shown, a short description and the facts.

Then there are different pages: Instructions (Overview with visual description, Basic Setup, Basic use), Downloads (Final PC Client & Firmwares), Community (Forum - link), Shop (link to seeedstudio).
Here is a example from the arducopter website for the introduction: http://copter.ardupilot.com/apmcopter/
Such a page gives a lot of information to a user and is easy to read.

Joomla is easy to setup (maybe i'lI can create one and publish it for test purposes) and new pages are easily created.

Greetings

[Daniel]

so far i remember they are already making a new website.
At least they said so on June 17th, 2013 in their blog

[Surrender]

Yes, i have seen this, but i just wanted to give some suggestions or how it could be done.

And nobody knows how long it would take

[marcus]

Thanks for the tips. Yeah, we completely agree that the homepage needs to be updated. When someone comes as a visitor for the first time it's very hard to get an overview of what we are doing and what the website is about. They mostly see what ever blog post happens to be on top. We are working on updating the home page but we are still discussing ideas and what it should look like. Making this isn't among the highest priorities right now, but we are aiming at having it done after the summer.

The current leading idea is to keep the current colors (green, grey and black) and the current layout, but improving the logo and some more graphical adjustments. We would then add a first page instead of the blog (something like this) with some nice images and highlight some of the stuff we do. Of course we would still keep the bog as a "tab" on the site. The plan is then also to integrate at least the forum but hopefully also the wiki into the current design, but we will have to see how it turns out.

The idea wasn't to add any more info to the pages except for the new front page. But your idea of having a small overview page with downloads and basic "how to get going" steps would be good.

What do you think about the "first page" layout suggested above? As soon as we have something we will post a link to the test site so you can have a look and give some comments.

[Surrender]

Great to hear that you like my tips!
The website is a important part to share important information to new visitors - if the page is informative then we get more and more users.

This template looks little bit similar to joomla, but i don't have any expierence with WordPress.
I have to think about it if it looks good (this first page you have linked). Currently I'm impressed from the arducopter website, it does look so good (my opinion).

WordPress vs. Joomla!:
WordPress is much more used for blogs.
Joomla! is more the CMS which is used for website with a blog functionallity.

I'll create a joomla testpage with the three defined colors (do you have the exact hex code?) and then you can tell me if it is good or not.
If you only want to used WordPress then i have to dig into this topic and create one with this CMS.

[Surrender]

How do you guys like this one: http://joomla30.cloudaccess.net/
Its a demo page for Joomla! 3.1.
Its clean and easy to setup new pages.

[marcus]

Joomla seems very nice and advanced but I think that it might be more than we need. Wordpress is ok for creating a few pages (like [url=http://www.bitcraze.se/about/]the about page) and it's already up and running. So unless we find something that we really like but can't get to work in Wordpress we will stick with that for the time being.

I'm note sure about the colors since I didn't do the images.

[Surrender]

The problem is that I personally want more than we need
No, i have expierence with Joomla, thats why I want to use it.

I try to set up a "bitcraze" website, after that you have saved your time, but you can look at a website and compare it.

[Surrender]

I'm creating a new webpage based on Joomla! 3.1 and T3 Blank Framework.

You can watch the changes here: Preview Webpage

I'll add new content and items every time. The layout is changed fast and also the theme (color etc.).