[Webcom] Website branding and site focus ideas

[Tyler Mitchell]

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