Liferay.com is getting a facelift.  Fresh theme, content, re-flowed flows - the whole 10 yards (why would anyone want to go only 9 yards, when it doesn't even get them a 1st down?).  And we're not just going to change the site once, but we really want to focus on giving ourselves a new platform for analytics, A/B testing, and the flexibilty to make incremental site refreshes and improvements over the long and short haul. It's gonna be good.

Given our open source roots and thriving community - the more innovative "ah-HA!" ideas we can get (including ideas from you!) the better!  And that's where we've started - by creating a sort of "new idea stew".

And quite the stew we have created.  We've had dozens and dozens of meetings with all sides of our company, gathering as many dreams and ideas as possible from our partners, events team, training team, support folk, international offices - all across the Liferay map.  Some feedback we heard came in resounding choruses ("Make the website less static!  More interactive!  And for goodness sake, more intuitive!"), and some ideas were new and ingenious, ("Turn the user dashboard into a one-stop shop for apps, license keys, news, suggested downloads, and everything that is hip and cool!").

So how does one gather so much feedback and make any sense of it?  We needed a way to "connect the dots", to give each idea a chance, while still letting the common themes simmer to the top.  Check it out - here's a draft of our affinity diagram (insert magic twinkly sounds and flowery hand motions).

Doesn't it look somewhat intimidating and professional??  Yeah... *long, dreamy sigh.. followed by being startled into sudden awareness*  So yeah, the idea is to find all of the common issues/ideas and plop them into groupings - groupings that settle into bigger groupings, that snowball into top priorities for us to answer in our coming months of concept brainstorms, wireframes, and development.  Hopefully something like this can help some of you if you're in the very same scenario for your company website.  More updates to come!

We are still young in this re-designing endeavor, but we'd love to hear your ideas and hopefully add a post-it idea in your name.  What do you want to see happen on liferay.com?

Love,

Webteam