[Ender]

Most all of your points are valuable observations. I however disagree about what you call "home page images." I find them a refreshing change from the facelessness of other hosting companies, it brings to my attention that there are real people behind this company that care about it, because their caring is in direct relationship with their earning.
Of course that could all be a fake and thought out by a devious PR company but so far it works on me at least.

[fergweb]

No--I suspect you're no victim of Marketing--they strike me as "sincere."

I think my only issue is with the images that are simply awkward and unpolished to the point of being uncomfortable. This is the digital age...we don't HAVE to keep the bad pictures. Pictures of kooky crazy wacky Uncle Timmy with a bag over his head don't warrant a home page placement.

They need to avoid images where the "you had to be there" rule applies.

Like I mentioned...I'm generally happy...been on board with DH since the year Al Gore invented the internet (1999)

http://fergweb.com/

[dallas]

We're not quite to the point where we can afford to have a professional photograper tag along with us to every event. 8-)

Those pictures really were just taken from our employees' and friends' personal photo collections and they are actually as unprofessional as a lot of them look. I wouldn't have personally chosen all of the pictures currently in use but the premise of the randomly rotating image gallery is a pretty cool one, I think. The pictures will be changed over time.

Your comments about the web control panel are reasonable. The look in place now has been around for quite a long time now and I know I'm personally pretty sick of it myself. We're a lean organization and we tend to emphasize function over form but it's gotten a bit out of hand! Rest assurred that we are well aware of that. 8-)

I disagree with the comments about the wiki, though. Wikis look like wikis and that's good for overall usability. Making the wiki look like our website would be a ridiculous waste of time and would probably result in it being harder to use due to the lack of familiarity.

The formmail page... well... how many people even look at that page? We should just take it down and put it into the wiki, probably.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

[rlparker]

Quote:Wikis look like wikis and that's good for overall usability. Making the wiki look like our website would be a ridiculous waste of time and would probably result in it being harder to use due to the lack of familiarity.

I completely agree with that thinking. When it comes to wikis, the "leaner" and "meaner" the better!

I'd far rather see development time spent on upgrading the underlying wiki software to a more recent version, than "eye candy".

--rlparker

[wholly]

Thanks for listening and taking the time to comment Dallas. That's why we like it here too!

Wholly

[wjd]

Quote: Your comments about the web control panel are reasonable. The look in place now has been around for quite a long time now and I know I'm personally pretty sick of it myself. We're a lean organization and we tend to emphasize function over form but it's gotten a bit out of hand! Rest assurred that we are well aware of that. 8-)

Web panel v3.0? 2.0 has been around for something like - 6 years?

digitalrundown.com

[Shonky]

Quote:Wikis look like wikis and that's good for overall usability. Making the wiki look like our website would be a ridiculous waste of time and would probably result in it being harder to use due to the lack of familiarity.

I agree with you about the wiki Dallas, the wiki should be left in the standard wiki format just for familiarity's sake.

---
Web Hosting Review | Hot Product Directory

[dtobias]

One aspect where the design has gone downhill (IMO) in newer DH sites is that the newer designs tend to have fixed-pixel-width designs that don't adapt gracefully to different screen resolutions and window sizes, while some of the older designs (such as this forum and the panel) have flexible designs that do adapt, which is superior in my view.

-- Dan