The website looks terrible for 2013.
I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.
Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular.
The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website.
I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful.
Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other.
Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift.
Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.
It is also significantly more usable than many of those.
More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release
IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.