[Marketing] Revamping the Website

[Recordon, David]

Hey all,
One of the things that has been on my list, and now the list of the
OpenID Foundation, for a long time is revamping the website from both a
design and content perspective.  It certainly has become friendlier over
time, but still has some problems:
 1) It isn't easy to find content mixed between the website and the wiki
 2) It isn't easy to edit the content or create new pages
 3) The style could be nicer on the eyes
 4) It is extrmeley developer focused and has no good resources for
others wanting to learn about OpenID
(http://www.notsorelevant.com/2007-05-15/openid-lack-of-promotion-to-end
-users/)

To help tackle this, the great guys at Vidoop worked on a new design a
bit over a month ago, but we haven't really made much forward progress.
The plan is to use WordPress to power the new site for a few reasons:
 1) It is the same language as MediaWiki which means fewer packages to
be installed on the server from a maintenance perspective
 2) The ability to create and manage pages is quite flexible, allowing
more people access to create and edit content
 3) There is a really nice OpenID plugin for both commenting and
administering the site

So, the challenge at this point is to get a new site design (as at least
a WordPress template if not also for MediaWiki) which we all can live
with.  The goals are:
 1) A flexible design so the content can change overtime without having
to recreate the design
 2) CSS buttons so that the site is easy to localize
 3) Balanced color scheme which is both professional and incorporates
"OpenID orange" in accents
 4) Top-level navigation combined with secondary navigation on some
pages

A non-goal at this time is creating a new logo.

>From a content perspective the largest goal is creating a site which
balances the needs of developers, users, and business people (aka
product managers looking at why they should support OpenID).

I'm sure there will be questions I haven't answered, but hopefully this
is a start.  I'd invite the Vidoop designers to post their work as a
starting point.  I've bought the domain http://openid2.info (was cheap)
as a development bed for this.  I already have WordPress installed and
some new text from Mike Ozburn and Johannes Ernst.  In general, I think
http://microformats.org/ does a very good job of a lot of this.

Cool? Cool!

Thanks,
--David