It's all about finding the Killer App

There's a lot wrong with E2's layout from a design/usability/accessibility point of view right now. I've just been looking at the front-page, both logged in and not (Firefox in, Opera not) and god damn, that is some busy shit.

First issue is that too much stuff there is aimed at noders. This is a two-edged sword. One the one hand, the casual browser just might be intrigued at all the "News for Noders" stuff that happens to be spread all over the front page. More likely, it's a turn-off.

The sidebar with its configurable nodes is all very funky from a clean code perspective but it is useless unless you're logged in. And this is really the challenge.

You have at maximum 20 seconds to grab the attention of the casual browser. That isn't much. If they can't identify what they're either looking for or just something, anything to grab their attention, you're screwed. You just lost another potential user of the site, valuable community member, content source, potential clicker of those google ads.... no, we can't just forget those. Sorry.

So what's E2's killer app? What's the grabber? What makes it unique?

In this ages of wikis and blogs and internet Web x.x foolery, E2 has exactly ONE killer application. One thing nobody else has. One, poor, oft-ignored, sadly neglected resource. No, noders, it's not you. Content is cheap and Sturgeon's Law applies even to you. Although you do generate this resource, to be fair.

E2 has a semantic search but that's not unique. It's pretty cool and much more could be made of it, but it's not unique.

What's unique is the softlinking.

YA RLY.

I believe it's possible (with some AJAX evil doing the donkey work), to create a spidering contextual semantic search on a clean interface. I'll do some work and some feasibility (thank Shub-Internet for XML!) on this and post links to a cleaned-up mockup of the frontpage (for non-logged-in browsers to start with) on my homenode for you to rip enormous chunks out of as you see fit.

I will daylog again when i have links posted.