This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say.

I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.

Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.

Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.

HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.

Utterly irrelevant.

As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.

Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.

I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice.

Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular.

The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website.

I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful.

Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.

You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.

Thing is, these days it would probably only take a small outlay of cash (or finding the right, desperate pro-bono designer) to get a fairly good landing page. Nat Friedman of Xamarin laid this out pretty clearly in a blog post [1]. Just a damn themeforest template would do wonders.

[1] http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/

Come to hacker news,which is arguably the most ugly site I visit everyday.See this.

I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that.

The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other.

Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.

I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?

> We all know most users are screaming for improvement.

Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".

Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P

With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift.

Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.

Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.

It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.

Please send a mockup, improve copy text following the comunity goals or a better proposal for the site information flow. It will not be ignored.

At least it loads fast and is navigable. It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?

That depends on whether or not the site is repelling the sort of users LibreOffice wants to attract.

Difficult to say without an A/B test or similar. The site certainly doesn't look any worse than a great many fortune 500 websites that continue to do billions of dollars of business.

It is also significantly more usable than many of those.

Compared to what? It looks decent enough and it's even functional.

I actually really like their website; I don't like that it has such a small fixed width, but I'm quite drawn to the simple design.

More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.

Software looks terrible for 2013

Along similar lines - the name is terrible. Open Office was so much better.

They wanted the name, but Oracle wouldn't give it to them.

I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...

Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?

First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation.

Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release

IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.

Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org.

It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.