i like the new blue site...its dark blue could do with ligher fonts,buts its nice...
but curently there is not much functionality. One can only use it to only to browse a couple of screenshots and download vl-59...
by functionality i mean things that other distro websites have made their distro's famous..the site useful to the distro's users- so they use it as a tool and they visit it,not only the forum but the site itself- to find out what new is going on under the water,to search for packages,to submit back,to be guided as to how they can help the distro ( like
http://www.linuxmint.com/getinvolved.php )... maybe if you make the site very good you can set it to be homepage by default on the browsers..
Mandriva did that,also linux mint-they set this for homepage when user starts the browser for the first time:
http://linuxmint.com/start/i wonder if they're making money from google for that
also you could have a gallery:
http://linuxmint.com/mintart/where users post screenshots of their dekstop at the site- these screenshots are like ads, teasers for new users..and they're upto date with the distro and everything thats new about it dayly.
a good website will spread the word about vector,the website is not only the packaging of the product, its what gets new people to check it out,become part of it
slax and linux mint have a net frontend to their repository- "a software portal" or a "catalog" of sorts:
http://linuxmint.com/software/?sec=category&id=1&release=1I remember that somebody made a search for packages function but there is no link (or even a box) to it at the site...
also look at sites like frugaware's. Its so simple and minimalistic,but so informative. It has a very nice site navigation (very nicely organised) and a small "recent updates" box
(btw frugaware- a slackware based distro that uses the pacman+a gui frontend)check it out:
http://frugalware.org/images/screenshots/default/06_gfpm.pnghttp://frugalware.org/images/screenshots/default/04_gfpm.pngor slax's site:
http://www.slax.org/its so pretty,simple and beautiful- straightforward too
a package catalog would be nice if vector had a direct way to install packages just by clicking on them and it downloaded needed deps from repo automatically,without the need to start gslapt (the way ubuntu's gdebi... works) I couldnt find an alternative on slackware that does that