[OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

[SteveC]

Something that's come up a few times in chatting to people is the  
front page design of the website and how it's been pretty static for a  
long time. That's pretty cool as nobody has felt the need to hack it  
away and it's sprouted some cool additions with time. But there are  
some things that could be nicer, it could be made more obvious that  
you could edit for example. One of the things I've heard multiple  
times from newbies is that they thought you had to be a hacker to be  
able to contribute... so maybe it could be a bit more welcoming to  
people.

I asked the CM designers for some quick hacks on what different front  
pages could look like which you can see on the wiki page below. There  
are some very quick ideas there but it's not a full picture by a long  
way.

The other thing that could be better is the search engine optimisation  
of the front page so that it shows up higher for some search terms  
like "free maps" and stuff.

Anyway some thoughts are jotted down here:

	http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Front_Page

There are a bunch of open questions like what design elements should  
stay, what should go, what colour schemes would be neat. Feel free to  
contribute and if it's useful we can build a design brief based on  
comments and ideas... then if it's useful to the community we can have  
them do some more design work to build some cool front page mockups.

Best

Steve