Dries Buytaert

Great redesign. You can really see the changes - very much for the better.

As I mentioned here before, I'm a Drupal developer working with large corporate health care. I had a few comments.

By way of constructive critique:

I think the Acquia website has two major questions to answer: who and why.

Who is already done. That's the partners and success stories. There are lots of these - very many of them incredibly successful.

What: is still missing for me. I think that the basic questions "What is drupal?" "What is a CMS?" "Why choose Drupal?" all need to come after a basic list of things Drupal can do. Adding a new item to your frontpage's views carousel would make a huge difference. Like so:

What Acquia can do: public websites, intranets, newspaper/publishing websites, huge community websites, video websites, brochure sites, museum websites, event management, data handling/display,etc etc etc.

I think thing the Acquia website needs to scream out-loud is that Drupal is an absolutely limitless web technology - capable of meeting the needs of almost any industry - newspapers/publishers, government, social networks/communities, non-profits, bloggers, etc etc. And that people would be crazy not to choose it as their platform.

I think that angle is key, and I think its missing now. But hey, people call me crazy =)

I'm very happy with the fact that there's more stuff for designers at http://design.acquia.com/.
I thing Jay is doing great work here to get something goin' for css-xhtml designers who are interested in drupal.
I've been hoping something like this would come along !
Way to go Acquia & Jay !!

Very nice site. As with all design, people will like and dislike it.

I like the approach (persona's, roles, target audiences). But...

• The template is fine but the design looks "cheap". Stock photos in the carousel that don't match color wise dont add value (esp the sillouette one can be found a hunderd times online, and why a black (==negative) background?)
• The text is written from a publisher instead of reader point of view. For example "How can we help you?" is a call to action but "How Acquia can help with my business needs?" might have been better call to action
• The "audience persona"s are too political correct for my liking. If you are targeting corporate America this might be fine but at least in the .NL it looks "made up"
• The radio buttons (tout-pager) on the carousel are overdesigned and counter intuitive
• The wetfloor effects, the stickers.. nuff said
• The Drupal power by the people hands-make-tree graphic is horrible.
• The design elements do not look consistent. For example on products / services the 3d box icon is used. No where on the site this is repeated, not even on a detail page of a product/service.

• smaller stuff

• The AJAX tabs on the f/p have round edges, the glow/shadow do not. While the glow/shadow on the active tabs of the primary navigation do have rounded edges
• The background of an active tabs doesnt match the color of the blue field below it. The background of the logo in the footer isnt transparant and hence doesnt match the gradients of the footer

But, as I said. I like the template, have some problms with the design

I hadn't scrolled down completely, but I was very impressed with the screenshot.. even when I saw the subline "Acquia.com in March 2008" :-)

But the new site looks quite well, not on the screeshot, but in fullscreen.

I'm seeing a number of buttons which don't work at all, and others where the clickable hotspot is below the actual button image in Safari 4. Not good.