[Marketing] Website branding and site focus ideas

[Tyler Mitchell]

Forgot to mention that this will be a topic at our next Marketing meeting (in 13 hours or so from now).. and you are all invited to attend and share thoughts on this topic:

Timing: http://tinyurl.com/yzjbtmu
Agenda: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Meeting_2009.12.10



----- Original Message -----
From: Tyler Mitchell <tmitchell.osgeo at shaw.ca>
Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 9:37 am
Subject: [Marketing] Website branding and site focus ideas
To: marketing at lists.osgeo.org, webcom at lists.osgeo.org

> Hi everyone, 
> 
> It's been a while since we discussed the website focus and 
> branding topics as discussed at the marketing/webcom meeting in 
> February:http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/WebCom_OSGeo_Site_Focus
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Meeting_2009.02.05#Update_on_main_projects
> 
> On the branding side... I took the liberty of asking the graphic 
> designers (the same who helped our marketing projects this 
> year)  to give us some ideas for how to include some more of our 
> branding components into the website.  
> 
> I steered them to the discussion we'd had back in February and 
> based on the "site focus" wiki page and an old mock-up graphic 
> to encapsulate the site focus page contents.
> 
> The end result being a sort of launching off point front page 
> targeting various user groups and incorporating our colours and 
> some graphics:
> 
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/design/draft2a.jpg  
> (other versions with minor changes are in same folder, I cropped 
> this one)
> 
> I asked them also for a secondary page layout - that will be 
> more like
> a traditional layout with a sidebar/menus but haven't received 
> it yet.
> 
> At this point the design is for throwing tomatoes at,  rather 
> than just talking generally about some way to improve the look 
> and targeting more directly.  The text on the pages are just 
> some of the main points from the wiki and I expect titles, 
> bullet text and more to change - so think more about the layout 
> then the details of the text.  Regardless of content changes I 
> hope some branding stuff here would be useful.  What do you think?
> 
> 
> On the site organisation side...
> 
> I also took all the thoughts I could from the wiki on the 
> subject and put them into a mindmap, then cross referenced 
> between 'current site' and 'new ideas' to ensure content was 
> generally carried over.  Again, just an exercise to try to 
> envision where we could go:
> 
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/sitemap/
> 
> If you look at the mindmap, on the right side, the green text 
> represents pages that we currently have - and for the most part, 
> the black text represents pages we don't have yet but that 
> implied as necessary from the site focus page/discussion.  It's 
> a rough brainstorm for sure but hopefully is useful for starting 
> a conversation, so please share your thoughts.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Tyler
> 
>