Blender gets new website

Just saw this now. looks pretty exiting.
“Work on the back-end and framework has started some months ago already. We expect to release a public beta site within a week from now. This then is also the start people can get involved with helping out. Just wait for further announcements on blender.org.”
[http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/website-redesign/

http://staging.blender.org/](http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/website-redesign/)

will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

i’d love to contribute to a new fresh gallery,i shall get working on some art :slight_smile:

WOHO, awesome! :smiley: This is just what Blender needs! Better website -> more users -> more donations -> bigger/faster development -> even more users, etc etc.

Yay! I hate dark on white! I would at least like the option to have white on dark! I don’t even use Blender.org because there’s no way to change it (without custom CSS in your browser anyway). I’m glad the BA forums have a black on white theme to the forums. I’d have stopped reading here if they didn’t provide this option (or, again, find a CSS workaround).

Thanks so much Ton!

Good luck with Worpress though, I think they would have been better off with Django (based) CMS.

Can’t wait! I remember the 2.49 days, when I was just starting and almost gave up once I looked at Blender’s site.
Hope this one is going to attract more people. Blender is a great software and I’d love to see its community grow.

about the new design, could someone bring it to Ton’s attention that having an autodetect per os download is a bad idea…everytime we make decisions for the user it is bad…(game reference ahead).look at diablo 3’s inability to distribute attribute points…it just assumes how you spend them forcing you down a pre defined path…by auto detecting os, you will have a hard time downloading for another computer possibly, say I have windows at home, but at work I have linux…
just a thought.

Firefox website has a nice solution for that:

A link underneath to download for other systems and languages. Not a big thing.

One thing I hate about so many software websites is when they don’t even bother explaining what the software is. You have to hunt down what the features are and even then it’s usually just a list of bullet points with no further explanation.

Here’s what I would love to see added to the mockup:

  • There should be links overlaid at the bottom of the main image (or maybe just below) that cover the different systems of Blender: Modeling, Sculpting, Texturing / UV, Rigging, Animation, Simulation, Lighting / Rendering, Compositing and, Video Editing. These links take you to pages that cover what the main features of the sections are. If the designers were to just look at the last year of release log pages and combine them categorically into these pages, this would be more then enough.

  • Theoretically, each section would have a “Just added in version 2.XX” section at the top if there was new features that were added in the last two or three release cycles.

  • Another important thing is to give visitors a brief explanation of the newest features of the newest version on the front page. this will help old users decide if they need to update or not…

  • Videos! More and more videos please. Even if they are links to other websites’ feature explanations (like blendercookie for example). A picture may be worth a thousand words but a video is worth a million.

  • User spotlights.

we already have a decent system in place I think…I don’t see a reason to change it…maybe a simple drop down box to select which OS…???..

I like the idea of the new website! If someone would say specifically what buttons/icons they need, I can start working on some and donate them. :slight_smile:

I have a request though, for the main gallery, may you (speaking to the site designers here) only put family-friendly images up there? I know a lot of children and teenagers that use Blender and really like it, but they need to be guarded from evil media (if you understand). This is my request. :slight_smile:

are there any “bad” images there now? I don’t think there are…

it would be nice if there were more images(or at least easier to see the older stuff in the archive) and a way view different categories of images like by renderer or type of image (character, vehicle, sculpt…)

I kinda hate that as well, even though these systems usually get it right. For instance, “Yes, I know I’m in Linux 64bit, thank you for offering that download, but I’m trying to download insert software here for someone on Windows 32bit. Y U NO let me, website?”

I agree that the current system works. Maybe making it a little more compact would be nice, but having the different versions outlined on one page also shows how cross-platform and flexible Blender is when it comes to supporting different operating systems :yes:

@Indy_logic - more videos sounds like a great idea. I’d be glad to try and contribute some modelling tips, tool overviews, so on.

I just wanted to add that I would be up for this as well. Time permitted of course.

They sure take their time with the new website.

They aren’t just designing, they are redoing the whole site and migrating the content over plus new content. The structure, hierarchy, backend, frontend and design are changing. I work at an ad agency and sometimes this stuff can take from months to years (I literally mean that as well… depending on the complexity of the content and backend) to get it from nothing into existence.

Considering the thread is literally just 2 months old… not a whole lot of time has passed, so I don’t know what you are talking about. Not to mention that most of the work is being done voluntarily for free on the community’s free time.

From bf-webcontent:

looks nice

I would expect a donate button on the home screen

or rather then an actual donate button ,a button with the message “all thanks to you” , and underneath maybe a selfupdating few highlighted persons who donated.

Looks nice, but header image is too large. Flash based images with latest news would be good.

From bf-webcontent: