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

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:13 PM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com> wrote:
> One thing would improve our website considerably.
>
> A more unified "Brand Image" and web-page style.

My understanding is that the varying site styles were purposeful. That
way it's easy to differentiate that "SWORD" and "GoBible" are
different brands. If I go to www.ford.com and www.lincoln.com the two
are markedly different websites even though they are the same company.
They are marketed as different brands within the same umbrella
corporation but they want to maintain a distinct identity.

I don't think the difference from www.crosswire.org/ to
www.crosswire.org/sword/ is that big of a deal. I think the biggest
problem is that the /sword/ site is itself fraught with problems of
antiquated content, obtuse navigation, and difficulty updating.

--Greg

>
> 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
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Re-sword-support-Video-tutorials-tp4528871p4530049.html
> Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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