The website could be given a makeover and made to continue looking good in text-only browsers simultaneously. Just takes some thought into how the markup is going to be structured. What I'd like to see on the site side though, is less the look of the thing - but things like:
+ Maybe more focus on "community" as well as "support". I am also in support of trying to centralise and bring knowledge together into say one wiki, one bugzilla, one forum (I'm perfectly willing to discuss exactly what is possible, perhaps we're too diverse to do that, but I think the "official" stamp just gives a much better idea that Slack is alive and well).
+ RSS feeds for the changelog, yes, I'm lame enough to have one open in a tab of my web browser most of the time - but having it in akregator would be much nicer.
+ A bit more news, even if it's just "the -current tree has re-opened! test test test" and the like. I've seen blog suggestions, but I'm not sure Pat would be keen on that, he's already unhappy that the changelog is getting bloggy

NetworkManager interests me, and I can definitely see the desire for a grub installer some day. Lilo works for me at the moment now, so it's just something I think the distro might benefit from rather than me specifically.

Yes, alas, it's completely the other way round with Slackware: It *is* a beauty inside, eg. it now has D-BUS and HAL and UDEV, and all three work together so nicely as in hardly any other distribution. Which means that Slackware 12.0 scores high in end-user friendliness, finally! And that without giving up the least bit of what makes it so strong on servers. But the outside appearance is bound to chase away potential users... Which is a pity.

By saying the web site could use a little shape-up, I don't mean I want to see more show and less content. I am sure, however, that it could look a little more appealing, and still keep its unique style and its underlying KISS principle. Navigation is good, no doubt, so don't change that significantly. And the result doesn't have to look as fashionable as the Sabayon Linux website.

Regarding the "Slackware mindset": That's chicken and egg, I guess. Currently people might turn away after seeing the website, before they even know that they have got that mindset.

Hmm. Not to spoil all my arguments, but: As a matter of fact, I didn't find Slackware. It found me.

gargamel

Am I the only one, who thinks, that people, who know, what they want, find Slackware themselves? Pretty webpage is not important for them. I'm satisfied with Slackware webpage, because it lets you access information as comfortably as possible (Sabayon page probably makes people nervous). And Slackware design is one the best designs I have seen yet (the other being http://ircd-hybrid.com/).

I would like to see PostgreSQL officially supported by Slackware.


Thomas

Agreed. The Slackware site works for me; I can easily access the information and software that I need.

Probably most people learn about Slackware from word of mouth or forum rather than looking at different Linux distro web sites. However, as previously mentioned, centralizing some of the knowledge to the website would be very good.

Indeed...the page does what it was designed to, the way it should be.



And I see your point, however, potential users won't stay just because the page, you can have a good looking page, nothing fancy, just a little markup here and there, but if the user don't like at all the distribution, no matter if your page is atractive enough to bring the attention of new comers, the only potential users will be those who enjoy the distribution.

Based on that, I think that it's unnecessary to change something that it's already working fine, and I don't think that people who started to use slackware here on LQ felt dissapointed when they saw the page for the first time, I know I didn't, the page didn't scare me away.




Regards

The Slackware website supplies what it's supposed to: information, not eye-candy.

I say more color contrasts in the web site would be nice at least to make it more clear. If it's all white like it is now it's hard to see where to click or to distinguish sections from background. (changing the background to something darker would help for example, and if the buttons would become highlighted when moused over, that would be great it would fix pretty much everything appearance-wise).

I'm not so sure that the navigation is the strong point, it's not bad - but there could be a bit more "eye-catching" areas of the site to highlight the most important elements of the site (getslack and community/support I think could do with being fairly prominent). Also, there is a little ambiguity in the link text I would have said (i.e. if I read the list quickly, then decided I wanted to find out about the distro, I'd click "about", when actually the majority of the content is in "general info"). For an idea of what I mean see this quick draft (though, note it's mainly to give an idea of structure [I'm no designer], and since I was writing markup as I was going along layout bugs are possible).

The design however, is adequate, and the structure too. So it's not a great priority. I would have said centralising things into one knowledge base to avoid duplication of effort is more important at this stage. The current spread out system of community and support does work, but I would say it really works best for people who've been using it for a while - and that new users are left in the dark about how this spread out community operates. Plus, having things on one domain is very intuitive, it means you can standardise where all the parts are (i.e. you could guess that the wiki might be at wiki.slackware.com if you know the forum is at forum.slackware.com, and it's easy to remember once you know the convention). Alternatively, if we don't want to shift to one server those could be made to redirect as necessary.

Me too.

gargamel

Since Slackware 12.1 is to be released relatively soon, it seems like a good time to look back on some of the posts in this thread and compare what has actually changed.

How do things measure up for you?

Here's another vote for postgresql, the most powerful open source database server. Postgres running on slackware is a perfect match, solid and dependable.

Well, at least they could update the information about Slackware on their site. Just look here and you'll see what I mean:
http://slackware.com/info/.

Yes, it is outdated isn't it. I'd also like the site to change a bit, just to make it more readable and maybe improve the look while you're at it. I wonder ... if I were to make a new site design, then submit it ... would it have a chance ? Or would I be wasting my time ? And, no, it won't look like my site, I made it that way just to save time, I didn't put much time into it.