So, Brian has told me that him and cass are working on the website this week. Since getting bitshares.org to look professional and be a proper funnel for users, investors, developers and merchants is probably the most important task right now, I think it is imperative that everyone in the community comes with input, if they can.
As I understand it the plan is for the current pages to be updated, and a new page for developers will be added.
Please have a look at bitshares.org and post everything you think should be changed and added here. Hopefully we can get a discussion going, and arrive on consensus on questions like information density (little text vs lots of text), target (mainstream users vs bitcoin users), design style, targeted landing pages (like the merchant and developer page, perhaps we could also use an investors landing page?) etc. The most important thing is to have a clear goal with every landing page that ensures interested leads end up downloading the client, joining the community, signing up for a delegate.
The bitshares.org website will be the single most important factor in determining the success of our blockchain, so please don't be shy about voicing your opinion or criticizing anything you don't like. We cannot allow it be anything less than top notch once marketing begins and leads are referred to it.
I'll write more suggestions later once I've had some time to think about it, but one thing I think could be useful is to have the overall website layout broken into 4 landing pages for different target segments that looks something like:
bitshares.org (like the current frontpage, pretty pictures and a simple sell of bitassets. Has real time fetch of bitasset peg from CMC, and real time estimate of yield. bottom of the page has direct links to mobile wallet download and a link to the "getting started" page)
These pages are all visible in the top menu bar:
bitshares.org/developers (information dense rundown of open positions and desired skills, then a brief introduction to delegates. call to action is a link to the delegate subforum (perhaps a specific post describing submission rules for delegate applications) and a link to the "getting started" page)
bitshares.org/merchants (a very brief explanation of what digital currencies are, then explains the advantages of accepting bitassets as a merchant. CTA is a list of ecommerce plugins and link to the "getting started" page)
bitshares.org/investors (a sell of BTS for bitcoiners/blockchainers. Explains the specs of our blockchain, briefly explains DPOS, briefly explains the value of bitassets. bottom of page is link to whitepapers, a list of BTS exchanges and link to "getting started")
bitshares.org/getting-started (several different boxes | Join our community: links to reddit and bitsharestalk. | Get a wallet: links to mobile wallets. | Download the full node: github links to QT wallet. | Read the whitepapers: links to whitepapers.
bitshares.org/blog (like now)
bitshares.org/wiki (wiki might not be presentable enough for this yet)
once the new pages are up and running we should also aim to get localization as soon as possible, something that can probably relatively easily be crowdsourced.