Once nice thing about the site is the deep linking. It makes it easier to give someone a url to go navigate to a certain page that way. It'd be nice if that functionality was kept around. Like gmail has tags like #inbox or #settings, which is nice.

I think it's nice to see a new look every so often. I think what you have now works well. I like the simplicity of it.

I agree....keep it simple and fast. There are a number of great designers out there, it all depends on how much you're looking to spend. I'd like to see a mobile version and/or an iphone app.

Yes, if you "Must" redesign, please NO FLASH!

_________________

Where "Thought Crime" is commited
http://www.rejecttheherd.net

1. Current Linode is OK, I do not feel it needs radical redesign. Main page is one of the most usable vps-selling pages I saw.

2. I'd recommend redesigning the menu layout. Currently there are too many levels of the menu (account/profile/logout, then linodes/members/community, then linode manager/dns manager/...., then Dashboard/Console/...). I remember being unable to find where reverse DNS settings are until someone on the forum pointed me.

General separation Linodes (Offer/About could do better) / Members / Community is OK, but inside Members section the navigation should be rethinked (I'd prefer clear one menu with submenus/subtabs to four alternative schemes)

That is exactly the plan for the members' area. Separating out the public and private sides will allow us to move everything up one tab level -- eliminating the "Linodes, Members, Community" top level tabs, and finally getting rid f those nasty sub-sub-tabs when manipulating a Linode.

-Chris

Besides the fact that I hate the color green, I love the design and menu levels of the site. Simple, efficient and well laid out.

My only real suggestion would be to change the top tab "Linodes" to Home or something.

I'd say, keep doing what your doing (which is doing Linux VPSs very well and within a good price range) and keep things the way Linux likes things (using K.I.S.S). You'll probably have a large, dedicated user base then.

Chris,
Another "me too" on the "keep things simple" comments.

One other note on my own experience:

When I was first looking for a virtual host several years back, one of the things that really sold me on Linode was that you had screen shots and descriptions of all (or most) of the control panel screens on the web site so that I could see them before ordering. This "peek" at how I would be able to control things, and the obvious care that went into making a flexible, well designed interface helped reassure me that Linode was the best available choice and I haven't regretted that decision.

So whatever you do I'd recommend keeping that part of the site in some form.

--John

I also suggest keeping the new design only as a natural evolution of the current one instead of a complete revision. I would also keep the green color scheme as I think that's by now probably a part of your visual identity which is good to keep consistent for marketing purposes. The Linode logo, after all, is green.

And I agree with others about no flash and keeping things simple and breathable.

Also, I don't think "Web 2.0" design is all about AJAX and it is not about complex designs at all. You can make a perfectly Web 2.0 style web site without AJAX. It is a much more broad phenomenon. Some elements recognizable in Web 2.0 are clean, lean, sharp spacey, uncluttered, easily readable designs. You probably saw that trend on the web already and by accident or not, Linode.com already employs some of these. It's by far not outdated as far as modern web design trends go.

Here are a few links I dug out of my bookmarks and web that might be helpful.

A List Apart is a well known web design instructional site.

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without - maybe one of them catches your eye.

And for inspiration here are some sites where you can look at other well designed and cool looking modern sites. I love browsing these for inspiration:

WebCreme.com

CSS Elite

CSS Leak

And more.

Also, if you'd like to launch a contest (buy whole or part of the design from the winner), here's a nice site for that: 99designs.com.

Cheers

I just joined and am learning plenty. I do not have experience running Linux servers.

Having confessed to that which I'm most ashamed of, I'll proceed with the requested feedback...

The problem:
The structure of your post sales support could be improved to help new members climb the learning curve. What you currently have quickly gets me to my node's command prompt within SSH, but that's about it. The wiki is a start, but not enough to give new members like myself a framework in which to quickly move up the learning and easy-administration curve.

What I'm looking for:
What would be nice is sort of a road map that I could refer to in order to get full use of my account. I'll eventually get there on my own, but providing a little structure to the process would help me climb the learning curve.

One possible solution:
Have your customers voluntarily answer a survey that says how they're using their node, what tools they're using and how happy they are with them.

With such a survey, I might be able to plow through the following questions faster:
* once I get my image setup, how do I back it up, restore it, and how well will that work.
* how should I be doing my box administration
* what sort of backup framework should I use that's effective, but doesn't blow my bandwidth and cpu budget
* what sort of monitoring should I need to be doing
* godaddy charges a lot for my domain renewals - can I do everything that they're doing now? If so what are my options and how do I implement them?
* what the heck haven't I thought of that will make my life difficult if I don't think about it now

Adios and buen suerte:
I'll figure all this out on my own, but right now, I'm reading much more than I'm actually doing.

After all that, I realized you might only be asking about what sort of lipstick to get your site. Slashdot's popular and one of my favorite sites. Maybe you could see how they came up with such a super-slick presentation.

Google is your friend for Linux setup, I believe Linode is unmanaged hosting.

That doesn't mean that providing tutorials and articles to help the beginner won't be a good thing. One of linode's main competitors (you know, the other 'node') has a fairly extensive wiki full of tutorials on how to set up the basic facilities one would want on a server - mail with virtual users, apache + vhosts, django, rails, mysql, etc, all geared for newbies. While it's all well and good to say "lol google it", having a welcoming first experience for someone who's never seen Linux before has got to be good for sales, right?

Perhaps.

I guess I am a little cynical and sick of people who don't even make the effort to learn anything and just want to be spoonfed.

To clarify it is not my experience at linode that has caused this point of view.

This is going to come off sounding like an elitist jerk, but if you can't answer these questions yourself, then a linode isn't for you. This kind of support is very expensive, and linode keeps prices down by not providing it, allowing those of us who know what we are doing to get more bang for our buck. I personally would rater mikegrb (lolz) be coding than telling someone how to set up postfix (which is a PITA for anything beyond a canned install).

My opinion, if there's not a lot of hand holding evident when signing up and it scares away a few customers that would be spamming the support ticket system with "newb" questions, then that's a good thing.

With that said, I find the community here very helpful and the irc chat channel where you can talk to Linode principals directly pretty amazing. My previous self-serve VPS hosting company had great tech support, but there was no community boards for VPS owners, no IRC, or anything like that.

Ah, an hour later I reread my post and it does come off that way.

You took the time to write out a well-thought-out posting with good suggestions. Us linode customers can often be a bit too protective methinks at times.

I hope you've found out by now that, even without a lot of knowledge, a linode is a great learning tool. If you screw something up you can just delete the image and create a new OS image. You can try various distributions easily. If you lock yourself out of the system, you can get back into it with lish or with finnix in the worst case scenario.

Of course if you have anything "production" running, even if it's your own personal stuff, reinstall is not an option, so eventually you figure out how best to back it up (there's been other threads on this on the forums lately) and restore.

Some people have even taken their linode images into their own PCs and run and test things in a virtual machine environment like vmware.

Unfortunately, I agree with you. Only unfortunately, because I see how low Linode's prices are to competitors, how much hardware you get for your dollar is awesome, and the fact that doesn't seem out to make the owner a million dollars, rather to provide a great service to others in the Linux market while fulfilling his dream.

Perhaps the last part is just a vibe I get, but linode seems like a normal, honest person, not like a business pr*ck that would try to screw you over at first chance to make a buck.

While providing tutorials is great, there are so many on the net already (howtoforge, linux.com, the Linux Documentation Project) they do there job very well. If we want to provide good documentation we would probably just copy everything from there anyway.