I was just perusing linuxtoday.com, when I noticed a story on Blender. News spreads fast, dunnit?

Anyway, I flicked through the comments on the article that they'd written, and there was one recurring theme - 'What is Blender? I went to Blender.org, and it doesn't say!!!' . Now, a load of flames followed these pointing out that if these people really wanted to know then they would've followed the links to the forums, etc..... But I think that they do have a valid point. The Blender.org frontpage doesn't actually say what Blender is.

Suppose someone hears about this great new open source project on Blender.org, and they consider participating. They're not gonna be interested if they have to spend ages wading through the site to actually find out 'what this Blender thing is all about', are they?

It would be really easy to implement on the page, and I reckon it could make the world of difference. So why not?

LethalSideParting

LethalSideParting wrote:

It would be really easy to implement on the page, and I reckon it could make the world of difference. So why not?

Because it's seemingly the case that many people have to say: good idea! Let's do that!

So, yes! You have my vote for it! It should really be done, and I've already written elsewhere that I don't know of a single "development website" that doesn't also have a short statement on what it's all about.
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Felix

LethalSideParting is completely right . The first thing that you should see on Blender.org, should be what Blender is. I now that at least it says "Blender development" on top, but maybe webmasters should notice that not everyone that enters Blender.org nows what Blender is.

You could write in the top page of the site what the Blender3d.com site says:

"Blender is a cross plaform 3D creation suite, allowing fully integrated modeling, animation, rendering, post production and interactive 3D creation and playback".

Hi everybody; I've been posting news about blender at linuxtoday these last months to help on rising 100k and as they didn't say even a word about Amsterdam party and the final GPLing, asked them for a short mention about this -imho- great happening.

The story was finally written, and I feel a little bit guilty because of that load of flames the article was followed by.

Maybe blender.org site needs a more comercial look the first time you enter in, the way it used to be when it was a comercial product. Remenber NaN site? Anyway, the actual website is OK for me.

Congratulations Ton!

Hi Xabigoi,
Don't feel bad! Sounds like it was some crap journalist at linuxtoday.com who screwed up, not you. You intentions were good - what more can we say? Besides, it's given us a taster of the Linux community's reaction to Blender.org, and I feel that it's a very important one (99% of open source programmers use it, after all...). I think that we've struck a large problem here that we'd all been blinded to - we all *KNEW* what Blender was, so to us it didn't matter. But what about Joe Opensource?

This needs to be resolved. Two lines at the top of the home page is all it would take!!!! Comments, anyone? (hint, hint, Ton )

LethalSideParting

Yah I agree, but I hate it to do random stuff just because people mention it. In fact, I am now continuously doing that!
I try to get some ordered way of working through the immensive list to do here. As you can read in the article at the front page, getting a lot of cool blender info back is definitely in the planning.

Last weekend we prepared for the move to our definite server & new provider. That attempt failed due to some h/w error. Until the we move to the new server, I was told not to change stuff at the old server.

The server now is back up, next try to move is tomorrow.

I agree with LethalSideParting, I noted at first glance at the site that there is very little explination for anything. The site assumes that everyone on the site knows everything they need to know already and serves only as a resource for experienced users.

I suggest a lot more guest/newbie-friendly content.

(Thats my two cents)