Originality, personality, and emotional impact in the new design

[Reqrefusion]

I have been following the work here for a long time. And I want to say that, at least to me, what is emerging does not yet feel strong enough in terms of originality or appeal.

If this were just a regular institutional website, or something similar, maybe this approach would be acceptable. But this page needs to awaken something in people. It needs to speak to their emotions, make them believe that FreeCAD is a sufficient tool, and encourage them to donate in order to support the people working behind it.

People make every decision with their emotions. And they can only be moved through emotion.

What is being produced right now, however, feels quite mechanized and far from engaging to me.

I know the oddities of the current site. Some of them are irritating, and some may even be genuinely flawed. But they still give it originality and personality. I do not really see that here yet.

More importantly, I do not get the impression that this is being treated strongly enough as part of the development process. And yet, I think these things matter as much as everything else, perhaps even more.

What makes a human being human is not flesh and bone, but spirit.

[YosypC]

Last time I built the repo there was yet no design (RIP my Debian partition I need to reinstall), but only scaffholding. What makes you feel we can't first establish a technical foundation and then leverage its tools to treat the "spiritual" side as meticulously as it deserves?

I agree on the rest. In my opinion, this project needs to gain priority over features implementation; the website and the documentation are the very first "business card" that people build their first impressions with, arguably the most important.

I share your concerns. Perhaps you can list some websites we could take inspiration from, present some drafts about the future UX/UI or list reasons why the current technical choices will not allow or will make them difficult. The project is just 3 months old and it's been solely built by @marcuspollio . Can you point out some of the individual choices or paths that might not have potential? So far he's been doing a purely mechanical work, no spirituality is meant to be here at the moment.

More importantly, I do not get the impression that this is being treated strongly enough as part of the development process. And yet, I think these things matter as much as everything else, perhaps even more.

The project has been granted from the FPA: FreeCAD/FPA-grant-proposals#40
We sure do need more people working.

You're already a member, but I'll link the discussion for reference:
#4

[Reqrefusion]

FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Homepage#165
The project started a long time ago, well over 3 months. It was also developed for a long time in marcuspollio's own private repository. During these developments, I tried to contribute, especially by adding animations to the existing site. However, the current interactive system was rejected. I don't think the one proposed in its place is that good either. I've been following and contributing to this project from day one, but I don't understand the vision here.

Last time I built the repo there was yet no design (RIP my Debian partition I need to reinstall), but only scaffholding. What makes you feel we can't first establish a technical foundation and then leverage its tools to treat the "spiritual" side as meticulously as it deserves?

This project has been around for two years, and I haven't seen anyone else working on it besides me. In terms of originality, it's in a worse state than the current site.

I share your concerns. Perhaps you can list some websites we could take inspiration from, present some drafts about the future UX/UI or list reasons why the current technical choices will not allow or will make them difficult. The project is just 3 months old and it's been solely built by @marcuspollio . Can you point out some of the individual choices or paths that might not have potential? So far he's been doing a purely mechanical work, no spirituality is meant to be here at the moment.

Even the current site is an example of this; for instance, the scroll-based animations there are even present on the Autodesk website I first looked at. You can check the screenshots and videos on the forums of other programs' websites.

As I mentioned above, it has been under development for two years.