Forum | Website work before SpaceUp?

If things go well at SpaceUp, then in about 20 days or so we're going to have a large, sudden influx of people coming to our site for the first time – and they won't be the normal random first-timers we get every day, they will be people who are into space, who know about it, who work in the industry, and who might be really, really interested in helping us out.

When Open Luna was featured in an AskSlashdot recently, a lot of people commented that their website looked like crap – even that it looked like a scam.  Others went so far as to say that this was common in the amateur spaceflight arena, indicating Copenhagen Suborbitals as another example of a good group with a terrible website.

The purpose of this post is not to suggest that our current website is terrible or scammy!  Rizwan has done a great job getting a lot of web infrastructure up in a very short time and I'm sure we all appreciate it.

The purpose of this post is to emphasise that how a website looks is very important and that we should probably give ours some thought.  If there are any ideas we want to see happen, it would probably be best to try to get them done before SpaceUp.  So let's throw in ideas to make sure our website looks as good as it can by the end of Feb.

Maybe the biggest concern that I have is that our website basically has two parts – the Wordpress powered part and the Wiki powered part.  All the real "meat" – all our technical ideas, renderings, etc. live in the Wiki part, but people "land" in the Wordpress part when they first hear of us, and there are very few bridges from the Wordpress part to the Wiki part.  The new links on the side to the CLLARE and OHKLA Wiki pages are a help, but I really feel like there needs to be immediate links to a lot of the important stuff on the front page.

I've come to think of the mozilla.org website as being a really nice example for us to follow.  Straight away on the front page it has a big, bold, ideological statement ("We believe that the internet should be public, open and accessible"), it has links to three pages which discuss the most important aspects of the Mozilla foundation, and it has links to all their major projects (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) with attractive logos for each of them – and yet it still looks very clean and uncluttered!

If we had a layout like this, replacing the big "We believe" with our "Space exploration by anyone, for everyone" motto, replacing the "We’re a global community", "We’re an open source project" and "We’re a public benefit organization" texts and links with texts and links related to our mission statement, social contract and design philosophy, and the Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. buttons / links / blurbs with ones for OHKLA and CLLARE, that would be fantastic.  They wouldn't necessarily need to be laid out in the same positions as on the Mozilla website, I just mean that Mozilla is proof that it is possible to get that level of information laid out on one clean, navigable page, and so we should try to do it.

I also feel like maybe the social networking buttons which appear on our non-home pages should also be somewhere on the home pages.

Thoughts?