Thread

Aesthetically I think the new site looks nice, it’s very modern and feels fresh.

I was introducing a client to EE and was shocked to be completely unable to find a basic list of the core features. Where is this on your new site? It was all clearly there on the old site. The old site felt more like a portal for everything EE, but that seems lost on this redesign.

The new approach appears to be more tech geared, is this part of a reboot of the Expression Engine target market? I realize you can still go directly to devot:ee, but why is that completely missing from your site?

The client was turned off to EE due to the frustrating user experience on your new site.

I have to wonder, did the average user and small businesses just get phased out of using EE moving forward? Those support prices are scary.

good work sir Its really Helpfull.

Well, at least there’s still a link to buy it—even if you don’t know what you’re buying. The informational parts of the expressionengine.com site seem to have been reduced to one page.

I agree about the future list, I was looking for this also but basically when you’re new to EE you’re left in the dark about this and thus have no way to become enticed to buy it from reading the site alone. You know in my opinion Ellislab should invest in getting marketing/copywriting done right, because it’s obviously not one of their strengths right now. A nice design yes, but what about the message and the copy?

For example this also:

MOJOMOTOR IS HARD TO USE
while painting origami—one of the hobbies you may acquire while your client manages their own sites with MojoMotor.

It was totally confusing to me the first time I read it. Especially since the “hard to use” part is in big letters compared to the rest and then it’s also a slider image - so it slides before you can read the rest. So all you see is the sentence it’s hard to use?? Not the message you want to get across I figure and confusing. And the second line… When I read it I think about the book titled “don’t make me think!”. I mean, I want to know why I should consider EE, but clever obfuscated headlines fail to get that point across swiftly.

I would also recommend reading “Don’t Make Me Think.” Twice.

Its been a while since I was on the forums, etc. so when I returned to it I was kinda shocked by the changes.  I’ll be honest - I’m not a fan.

Here’s where I’m coming from…  I run a small web development company, specializing mainly in CodeIgniter.  We’ve done dozens of large scale CI apps for our clients - mainly govt, corporate, academic, large business, etc.  We have some small business clients, but they are rare.  Most of our business comes from repeat engagements with larger clients.

We routinely get asked about web sites.  Not web applications per se, but web sites that our clients may want to put up for their products, services, whatever.  Since we do a lot of SQL database work, and code in PHP, its advantageous to us to use something that is somewhat ‘compatible’ with our CI work.  EE is the most logical choice.

But when I try and suggest to clients to use EE, they have never heard of it.  I used to be able to send them to the EE website, where it had all the larger corporate clients like Disney, etc. advertised.  This added to my credibility since I was able to state that our technologies are being used by other mega-corporations. 

Now if I send them to Ellislab.com, it looks like I’ve sent them to a childish website.  There’s nothing vaguely corporate or anything that gives a sense of trust here.  What was a great site before in terms of a valuable marketing tool that resulted in me ordering half a dozen $299 licenses from Ellislabs, has turned into something I would never send someone to.

I think its hard enough to talk to the great capabilities that EE has in it let alone have to be able to stand up against the FREE Wordpress offering, but the fact is that when you are talking with IT departments, or department heads that think they know what they are talking about, but never do, you constantly have to justify your own existence and I don’t feel that I’m getting the support from Ellislabs to make all of us some money here with this site. 

I’m sure some may flame this post, but I present it purely as information that I’m hoping someone at Ellislabs may read and realize its not unbridled flaming against their great product and company.  Please take from this something in hope that the site becomes a helpful tool for us EE & CI developers out there.

Thanks
Myles

Ya new site sucks. The funniest page is the pricing on http://ellislab.com/support

Somebody must have handed a crack pipe around the office..