6 ms·

The website looks terrible for 2013.

grakic 14y ago
Please send a mockup, improve copy text following the comunity goals or a better proposal for the site information flow. It will not be ignored.
testimoney2 14y ago
Software looks terrible for 2013
vacipr 14y ago
Come to hacker news,which is arguably the most ugly site I visit everyday.See this.
- testimoney2 14y ago
  Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.
  - vacipr 14y ago
    It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.
- jre 14y ago
  I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that. The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other. Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
  - vacipr 14y ago
    I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      > We all know most users are screaming for improvement. Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift. Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.
calinet6 14y ago
This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say. I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be. Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Utterly irrelevant.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.
      - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
        Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice. Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular. The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website. I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful. Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
MattDL 14y ago
I actually really like their website; I don't like that it has such a small fixed width, but I'm quite drawn to the simple design. More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
dhimes 14y ago
You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.
- r00fus 14y ago
  Thing is, these days it would probably only take a small outlay of cash (or finding the right, desperate pro-bono designer) to get a fairly good landing page. Nat Friedman of Xamarin laid this out pretty clearly in a blog post [1]. Just a damn themeforest template would do wonders. [1] http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/ http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/
jiggy2011 14y ago
At least it loads fast and is navigable. It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  That depends on whether or not the site is repelling the sort of users LibreOffice wants to attract.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Difficult to say without an A/B test or similar. The site certainly doesn't look any worse than a great many fortune 500 websites that continue to do billions of dollars of business. It is also significantly more usable than many of those.
crististm 14y ago
Compared to what? It looks decent enough and it's even functional.
WayneDB 14y ago
Along similar lines - the name is terrible. Open Office was so much better.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  They wanted the name, but Oracle wouldn't give it to them.
  - WayneDB 14y ago
    I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffice-to-apache/9035 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
    - soperj 14y ago
      Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?
      - WayneDB 14y ago
        First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation. Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org. It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.

Please send a mockup, improve copy text following the comunity goals or a better proposal for the site information flow. It will not be ignored.

testimoney2 14y ago

Software looks terrible for 2013

vacipr 14y ago

Come to hacker news,which is arguably the most ugly site I visit everyday.See this.

testimoney2 14y ago
Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.
- vacipr 14y ago
  It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.
jre 14y ago
I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that. The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other. Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
- vacipr 14y ago
  I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    > We all know most users are screaming for improvement. Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
sergiotapia 14y ago
Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift. Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.

calinet6 14y ago

This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say. I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be. Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.

chris_wot 14y ago
Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Utterly irrelevant.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.
    - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
      Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice. Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular. The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website. I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful. Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.

MattDL 14y ago

I actually really like their website; I don't like that it has such a small fixed width, but I'm quite drawn to the simple design. More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.

dhimes 14y ago

You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.

r00fus 14y ago
Thing is, these days it would probably only take a small outlay of cash (or finding the right, desperate pro-bono designer) to get a fairly good landing page. Nat Friedman of Xamarin laid this out pretty clearly in a blog post [1]. Just a damn themeforest template would do wonders. [1] http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/ http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/

jiggy2011 14y ago

At least it loads fast and is navigable. It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?

mkr-hn 14y ago
That depends on whether or not the site is repelling the sort of users LibreOffice wants to attract.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Difficult to say without an A/B test or similar. The site certainly doesn't look any worse than a great many fortune 500 websites that continue to do billions of dollars of business. It is also significantly more usable than many of those.

crististm 14y ago

Compared to what? It looks decent enough and it's even functional.

WayneDB 14y ago

Along similar lines - the name is terrible. Open Office was so much better.

chris_wot 14y ago
They wanted the name, but Oracle wouldn't give it to them.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffice-to-apache/9035 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
  - soperj 14y ago
    Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?
    - WayneDB 14y ago
      First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation. Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org. It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.