website redesign

Because WSO2 is an open source software company, we have two websites, with two very different purposes and target audiences.  This is very common in our industry, and typically you refer to them as the dot-com and dot-org sites.  The dot-com (wso2.com) is how we make our living, and dot-org (wso2.org) is the community where we develop our projects in the open.  Typical visitors to dot-com would be anyone interested in purchasing support or consulting, managers, journalists or analysts, anyone looking for information about us as a company.  Dot-org has much more traffic, as anyone who wants to download one of our products, read documentation, ask a question in the forums, contribute code etc would do so here.

In 2008, we revamped our dot-com site to better tell a story about how all our products fit together.  We had been calling ourselves “the SOA company” for a while, but because we are 95% engineers, we have had a hard time explaining this self-definition without immediately diving into product features.  So we introduced a new concept explaining how SOA is all about the services, and if you think about it, you can group all SOA-related activity into 4 main categories (service creation, service connection, service composition, and service governance).  The new dot-com site is cleaner, simpler, easier to use, and most importantly, it answers the question “who are we?” much faster for a new visitor.

Our biggest challenge yet would be to replicate these benefits through a refresh of the dot-org design.

It’s a well-known, if often ignored, rule in marketing that you shouldn’t just refresh your site design “just because.”  It’s a risky move: it can break links, remove keywords or thwart SEO, confuse repeat visitors, and cause a lot of headaches in general.  But in the case of wso2.org, we had to do it.  We have 14 WSO2 projects, and are involved with countless more Apache projects, all of which must be documented and supported on our community site.  Sometimes I found myself lost within the site, and *I work for the company*.  I could only imagine some first-timer to the site – if that happened to them, would they even bother coming back?

Our new site launched over the weekend, in conjunction with the release of 4 (!!) new products and the WSO2 Carbon framework.  We centered the homepage around the same project categorization that we’ve used on dot-com (create, connect, compose, govern), but we wanted to make it seem simpler, less marketing-y, and more appealing to developers.  Instead of trying to list out all 25+ projects right on the page, we simply link to “all other projects” in the WSO2 family.

The other cool feature I like are the 4 orange blocks at the top of the page.  These can quickly be modified to promote any new project release, an upcoming webinar, anything, with maybe 2 minutes of effort.

Our main resource center on the site, the WSO2 Library has been redesigned from the content up.  This took place a couple weeks ago, and now visually matches the new site.  The biggest changes are deeper than the surface design however: how the content is organized is now greatly improved.  You can look for resources by type (webinar, podcast, article, etc), by project/product, or by pre-set keywords in a “search cloud”.

We’re immediately following this up with reorganization of both our downloads and projects pages.  I’ll share with you when these are live, and some of our thought processes behind the changes.