Thursday Nov 06, 2008
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Today's Page Hits: 127
Thursday Nov 06, 2008
Sometimes beauty is more than just skin deep. Sometimes something looks great and makes life easier. Sometimes a beautiful form yields better function. Sometimes Sun redesigns our sun.com home page. We don't make changes to sun.com lightly. We don't do it to follow font or color trends or add new web widgets. We do it to recognize, value and build our communities. At Sun we have student, startup, small & medium business, developer, partner, and enterprise communities. Now our communities have their own chunk of the home page. Things that interest a community are grouped together and easier to find. Pages are targeted and focused to each community's needs. Developers will quickly find the SDN or updates to the SDK. Students will find the Sun Academic Initiative and a student community page. Startups will find information, community and specialized help from Sun all on a single page.
We also now have a direct path to our top downloads. Interest in our open source software cuts across all our communities so we've placed it where everyone will see it. No searching, no navigating. Just click and download!
We're interested in what our communities think of this change-up. We want your feedback. We'll listen. Click on the feedback button and let us know.
The new home page is a real improvement, especially the different news items for different types of audience (student, start-up, etc). Can I suggest that the "How to Buy" link at the top should include a "Catalogue" item in the menu? That way people who already know what they want can easily find it and add it to their cart.
Your competitor Red Hat makes it quite easy to buy - for example: https://www.redhat.com/apps/download/
It would be good to see a similar focus on selling software subscriptions on the Sun web site. Currently it's very hard to find out how to buy a subscription, for example see: http://www.sun.com/software/
Finally I think you should replace your custom site search function with Google search. It works better because it makes good suggestions when you mistype search words.
Thank you for considering my feedback.
Posted by Kevin Hutchinson on November 06, 2008 at 05:04 PM EST #
Thanks so much for your feedback. I've passed it right along to the folks that are making changes to the site. AmyO
Posted by AmyO on November 07, 2008 at 08:46 AM EST #
I happened to hit the Sun site this evening, apparently just the day after it was launched. The Irish slang word "gobsmacked" comes to mind. I've already blogged about it as the Ideal Software Vendor Home Page.
As always, the only thing Sun has to fear is imitators. If you can keep innovating end-to-end, products to pixels, code to community, just like this, you're going to roll over everything in your path.
Props to the whole crew.
Posted by Colm Smyth on November 07, 2008 at 07:05 PM EST #