[sword-devel] Websites (was: Video tutorials)

[David Haslam]

One thing would improve our website considerably. 

A more unified "Brand Image" and web-page style.

The stark contrast in going from 
http://www.crosswire.org/
to
http://www.crosswire.org/sword/modules/ 
(and related pages)
illustrates what I'm referring to.

It makes us appear incompetent to the outside world.

12 months ago Peter enlisted a friendly web designer to have a go at
improving things.
This fell by the wayside, probably because someone thought the changes were
too "drastic" and deviated too much from how we began.

Even going from 
http://www.crosswire.org/
to
http://www.crosswire.org/gobible/
with my subsequent redirect to http://www.crosswire.org/gobible/newpage/ 
involves a color change to the horizontal dividers, etc.

To a large extent, these core problems arise because we're not a top down
organization. 
We're all volunteers with different areas of expertise and interests.
Some have less time than others to thing about these matters, by virtue of
having day jobs or being in full time studies.

If we were a business, then the CEO or management team would make firm
decisions about such matters, and provide or allocate the resources to
implement the company policies. I've worked most of my engineering career in
a large multinational, so I've observed first hand how these things work
out.

Again, because many of us are programmers or engineers, few of us have
strong experience in marketing, nor possess the skills that go with the job
description. Just because all our products are free of charge doesn't mean
that we don't need to be active in marketing them. 

Many of our applications are better in some aspects than other Bible Study
software out in the market place, yet getting them recognized is an uphill
task. Just one example:

Our mobile (smart phone) apps do not require remote access to a streaming
text server. 
They don't even "call home" with usage statistics.  This is quite common
among other products. 

So for areas where internet access is patchy or restricted, we have a
competitive edge in terms of how our applications operate. Once installed,
modules do not need a continuous connection to keep working.

We need to build on our strengths. Anyone care to do a SWOT analysis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

David



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