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Which would you miss the most if it were gone?

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7 March 2008 - 2:38pm
Submitted by: ssalgy

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kmcleod's picture

The problem is ...

Submitted by kmcleod on 19 March 2008 - 3:21pm.

... that the world is all about flash and sizzle these days and substance is ignored. Hence the popularity of certain OSes from the dark side.

Professionals will be attracted to professional presentations.

The only flash I'm interested in are the web pages that load in one. That is to say, "the site loaded in a flash!" (which unfortunatley doesn't occur with Flash.

You can accomplish an artistic, attractive web page without all the distracting motion and sluggish response from animations of one kind or another.

I kind of like the stark appeal of the blank login page!

ethierba's picture

Don't take us for granted

Submitted by ethierba on 14 March 2008 - 12:31pm.

I was rather disturbed by the "hey, you're already customers" thing. Surely, the company is aware that many, many long-time Novell customers are leaving for bluer pastures. History clearly shows that taking current customers for granted is a dangerous thing.

True, a web site won't drive a customer away all by itself, but irritating your bread-and-butter constituents, the itinerant IT professionals, surely doesn't help. It amounts to telling techies, "forget about the steak, we have sizzle". IMO, Novell doesn't have much capital left to lose in this area. You don't have to look far to find long-time Novell proponents that are "giving up the fight".

I think Joe, above, is onto a good idea. If you want to keep the Nintendo home page, then do it, but give us IT pros a different portal, say "ITPro.novell.com", with the emphasis on substance and not, ummmm, "style".

coolguys's picture

The point was that the

Submitted by coolguys on 14 March 2008 - 4:01pm.

The point was that the high-level marketing pages -- the home page and the new Solutions pages -- are designed to attract new business, and are targeted at an audience different from our IT professional user base.

As you note, Novell.com has to meet two objectives: to gain new customers, and to keep existing customers satisfied post-purchase.

By far the bulk of our site is aimed at delivering the "steak" to our installed base. In fact, this Novell Communities site was specifically created for that purpose. Same with the Knowledgebase, the Downloads, the Customer Center, the Discussion Forums, etc.

Our site metrics reveal that our IT Professional audience overwhelmingly prefers to enter Novell.com at the Support home page or their product's Cool Solutions page. (And anyone who has read a TID knows that we don't do much in the way of "sizzle" for that audience.)

As you point out, the IT Pros prefer a utilitarian approach, since they are coming for practical stuff: support, tools, ideas, and advice. For them, the Novell.com home page is almost irrelevant; it's certainly not part of their customary traffic flow through the site.

But for the wide world of new prospects, the Novell home page and the Solution pages must do all they can to present an enticing, arresting, and intriguing vision of Novell's offerings. And that takes some sizzle.

ukdtom's picture

Agreed

Submitted by ukdtom on 12 March 2008 - 4:17pm.

Talking about Flash animations, this is a flashback to the webdesign of the '80

Novell....Face it !!!!

jmarton's picture

Animation contest? You're kidding, right?

Submitted by jmarton on 12 March 2008 - 5:24am.

I really hope this animation contest is a joke. The new starfield animation shouldn't be the first step, it should be the last right before Novell reverts back to the old design. There is absolutely NO reason to have any flash PERIOD on the login page. All it does is chew up CPU cycles unnecessarily and require users have proprietary software installed in order to login. On my dual core laptop running SLED when it's sitting at the login screen, just sitting there, each core has at least 30% CPU utilization and sometimes bounces even higher. The minute I close the login page utilization returns back to 0%.

Come on, Novell. This isn't some gaming website. This isn't a website designed for children. This is supposed to be a professional IT website. If you want to have some marketing pages with pretty flash animations go for it. But there's no reason to do it on a freaking login page. I mean, really.

Joe

coolguys's picture

Stars are gone now

Submitted by coolguys on 14 March 2008 - 4:11pm.

We quickly nuked the starfield from the login page. Point well taken.

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