I recently did a competitive research exercise for the Fedora Workstation web pages. That was mostly around content and messaging, but I can share a summary if it would be useful. it does cover things like imagery.

@aday that would be fantastic!

Hey! I don't have a lot of research with this but I took a course last semester that covered conducting competitive research. Is there any way I can pitch in here?

@dhairya15 Sure! I think two different competitive research analyses would be helpful:

1. One to evaluate the overall site structure / info arch of similar types of projects (one with a download payload, and user community, and a contributor communtiy)

2. Another to evaluate the aesthetics / visuals / styling / flashy features of stuff, not necessarily in the domain of software with a payload or even open source or software/tech.

Would you mind taking a look at developing #1, a competitive analysis looking at the site structure? Take a look at a few of these (or use others you think might be relevant, also of course open to your input @aday), and maybe fill out a grid like the below - basically for the sites you look at:
1. how is the site structured to deliver the bits or downloads?
2. how they accommodate the user community?
3. how they accommodate the contributor community?

Site Structure Competitive Analysis

I think doing a rough sketch of each site's respective structure could be helpful too.

I am attaching here a PDF slidedeck of a similar sort of competitive analysis I did. It was for a Red Hat publication, and we were looking to see how different print publications integrated their print content into their websites. Instead of answering that question, you'd want to answer the three - how do they position downloads / user community / contributor community. And note any interesting / innovative things you see or any good brain food for thought discovered.

For the second competitive analysis for visuals / aesthetics / features, I'd like to gather a list of inspiring sites. Here's a quick list but please feel free to contribute more.

• https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur/ (motion design, animation)
• https://www.ireland.com/ (motion design, animation)
• https://www.byalicelee.com/ (cool parallax)
• https://www.prisma.io/ (nice text and card layout, nice palette)
• https://tailwindcss.com/ (same)
• https://docusaurus.io/
• https://www.redhat.com/en/open-source-stories/colab
• https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/containers/kubernetes-approach

Finally I can comment on this.

I wrote a few years back a series for the magazine you find this way: https://fedoramagazine.org/?s=web+pages

The reason I wrote, I was really pissed about loading times of getfedora.org. Well I just opened byalicelee.com and it took 4 minutes to load, and for what for a parallax effect on the title graphic.

So please if you compare dont forget to compare loading times to, its really anoying you stand here on a booth want to show somebody something on the pages and it takes 4 minutes to load, I can be happy I distract that person for that time.

The problem is mostly that webdeveloper are lazy, use fontawesome fine but I must load a 140KB font where I use just 5 characters of? Not to mention that they use the CSS like it is, with features that arent used at all. Not to mention more roundtrips.

I worked for a local company a while ago reducing there load on the pages start mass was (if I remember right) 6MB, after cleaning the SVG, reduce them in size, doing some font merging and rewriting CSS I reduced the load down to 1MB so 5MB just nonsense as the pages are still the same. Now pages load in seconds without any optical change.

Dont forget to compare load size and time!

@gnokii Absolutely, these are meant to be references on visuals specifically but whatever we choose to do needs to be snappy. Including tons of external libraries also can be a privacy issue so I think we should probably self-host when possible.

Would you be willing to help us optimize when we get to that point?

@aday ^ still interested in that competitive analysis if you have it handy!

@dhairya15 are you still interested in this ticket? Let me know.
@aday if you have that competitive analysis you mentioned I'd love to see it!

Hey @duffy I actually started on this but then I lost a family member and I was away for some time. I'll be able to finish up with this by tomorrow I think

@dhairya15 I am so sorry to hear that - my thoughts are with your family!

@aday ^ still interested in that competitive analysis if you have it handy!

Sorry for the slow reply. When I went back to this work, it wasn't as developed as I'd remembered it. I've been trying to fill in the blanks, but have been busy with other things.

I think that it is obvious that we need to expand the amount of workstation content on the website. In terms of workstation requirements, there are some basic things that came out of reviewing competitors' websites:

• the ability to incorporate high-resolution photography (say of laptops, or people using the OS) and screenshots
• the ability to structure content into easily consumable chunks (I'd like to see larger type than what's on the current site)
• page structure that allows breathing room between content and allows us to take the visitor on a journey

The trickier question is around product positioning and how that should tie in with the visuals. My sense is that we'll probably want to put an emphasis on excitement and interest, with an upbeat presentation, as opposed to having a public face that is more restrained and reassuring in tone. However, that hasn't been discussed in any detail on the workstation side.

Is that the kind of input you were looking for? I don't think we're in a good position to talk about the user and contributor community aspects of the site at the moment, unfortunately.

Is that the kind of input you were looking for? I don't think we're in a good position to talk about the user and contributor community aspects of the site at the moment, unfortunately.

Hi @aday! Yes, that is wonderfully helpful, thank you! :)

Was there any specific competitor sites you thought we should take a look at for inspiration?

Hi @aday! Yes, that is wonderfully helpful, thank you! :)

Ah good, I'm glad!

Was there any specific competitor sites you thought we should take a look at for inspiration?

Was there any specific competitor sites you thought we should take a look at for inspiration?

So far I've only looked at Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. (I'm planning on doing Chrome OS and Elementary, but haven't got that far.) The Mac site is elaborate, but there are some relevant aspects (strong ,engaging graphics, bitesize content, product focus). forty.gnome.org is an example of a site that has some visual interest and could be put together relatively quickly.

1. my idea is to create a workspace - branch for this issue and each user of the design team can build a proposal ... in time, the design team can select the best web design.
2. yes, forty.gnome.org has a good design