On the Disappointing Redesign of Drupal.com

There was a little rumble on the Tubes Friday about the redesign of Drupal.com. Mostly I just saw a few folks doing the sycophant dance and expressing how awesome and beautiful the redesign is. These people must have a much different definition of "awesome" than I do. Or perhaps by "awesome" they do not necessarily mean "successful". The redesign is physically attractive, but "awesome" to me includes not only visual stimulation, but also success in creatively solving some problem or meeting some goal.

Drupal.com had a very good problem to solve: 30,000 unique visitors per month, most of whom were mistakenly typing "drupal.com" into their browsers instead of "drupal.org".

This is a huge audience. This is also, most likely, an audience that is unfamiliar with Drupal and looking to learn more. This is a fantastic opportunity to introduce people to Drupal and what it's all about, before sending them on to drupal.org. What, ultimately, do we want Drupal.com visitors to do when they leave the site? We should aim form more than sending them on to drupal.org, g.d.o or Drupal Planet. Visitors to those three sites who are funneled through Drupal.com instead of any other referrer, should be more likely to download Drupal or to register on g.d.o, and they should have longer time spent and more page views on whichever site they decide to visit. Simply put: drupal.com users should be sold on Drupal before being sent on to interact with the community at large.

Drupal.com becomes a marketing site for Drupal. It is the first introduction to Drupal for almost 30,000 people per month. This is where we interact with the uninitiated; people who aren't developers and people who are trying to decide between Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress.

The current redesign does none of this well. As has been mentioned in comments on Dries' blog, there are no links to drupal.org, g.d.o or Drupal Planet above the fold and the slideshow, which is pretty much all that most users will see, does nothing to really introduce Drupal and what the slideshow does say about Drupal is not very inviting.

My proposed wireframe for a re-redesign of the homepage.

My main complaint with the site is the slideshow; the links being below the fold is sort of an obvious blunder not really worth discussing.

The first slide, "What is Drupal," is the only one that provides any useful information. It's really nice to see the prominent websites that are using Drupal featured on the site. The bad thing is that those pictures really need to link to more information; a big image and a one-line kitschy statement are not going to sell anyone on a web publishing platform. It might pull them in, but you won't have success unless you get visitors past the "intrigued and curious" state and move them seamlessly into the "exploring and learning" state. The slideshow doesn't move the visitor forward and the only links from this prominent feature are to Dries' blog.

The other two slides do nothing to make Drupal seem appealing; they are full of inside jokes and confusing, ambiguous statements. It makes a new visitor feel as though they have trespassed into some fraternal clubhouse, where they neither belong or are welcome. I'm sure this is not the intended result of these two slides, but it is a common theme I've seen across the Drupal community.

Its impossible to completely prevent the formation of this sort of clique within any community, but it's very important for the Drupal community to be welcoming to outsiders and not seem like a secret society of developers. And isn't one of the main complaints about Drupal from non-users the fact that many people feel the CMS and community are unwelcoming to non-developers? Without our end-users, we're all out of a job.

Even though I think Development Seed does great work, and Drupal.com certainly looks great; I think Dries would have done the community much more good had he hired a PR and marketing firm to head up the redesign project. Mark Boulton was hired for the Drupal.org redesign and D7 usability testing because of his UI expertise and his reputation for thoroughly solving problems, even though he was not a Drupal expert. If Drupal.com is the first experience with Drupal for 30,000 people per month, why wasn't the brand identity of Drupal the focus of this project and a compatible expert hired?

What I would love to see come out of this is a serious, critical look at the brand identity of Drupal. One of the big things i remember discussing at DrupalCon in March was why non-developers, and designers in particular, choose Wordpress, Expression Engine or Joomla over Drupal. I think the one greatest thing we could do to overcome the perception that Drupal is only for developers is to spearhead a marketing campaign, focused on creating a really great brand identity that communicates that our community is friendly and eager to help newcomers.