Suggestion: Website redesign, user-friendly official client

[Unregistered]

With the newest ICQ-Trouble, I thought about recommending Jabber to friends. But you know what? To most people, setting up a Psi and registering a jabber Account seems like rocket science. Here's my suggestion to make jabber spread:

In my opinion, first Jabber needs an official client that's simple enough for my grandma to use. Psi just doesnt cut it (starting with the rather cryptic name).

Second, the jabber.org site should look more like firefox.com, skype.com or the google talk site, something designed to be viewed by end users rather than developers and geeks. And should include a big fat download link to the before mentioned client with a tutorial.

[Jehan]

For the Jabber client, there exist other clients more user-friendly, though unfortunately they are also often less featured (most often because multi-protocol). I am not expert of all clients though, so I will let other people on this forum advertise for their prefered one...

For the jabber.org website, I do agree it is not very good. But as it has just been changed, I think it won't be again for a while and the Jabber foundation will have to do something nice from it. Anyway the current website layout could be really improved and more intended to end users (even though you should clearly keep information for developpers, but not in front page!). I agree.

Edit: after writing this, I went to check the website to confirm. But indeed the website is not so bad. Just the problem is my last impressions were not so good compared to the previous website, where you had more contents. The new one, information are missing or incomplete. But I guess this can be improved with time.

[zeller]

I think the problem with jabber is that everyone is comparing it to AIM, MSN, etc. rather than seeing it as a how one views email. Nobody expects there to be one official email client, nobody expects to go to email.org to learn about and download the official email client. So really the problem is not redesigning the jabber.org website to be more user friendly, but it's educating people what jabber is so they know where to go. I also think having web registration interfaces is a more user friendly way to register than doing it in the client, or at least it's what most people expect.

That's one reason why I am glad that google adopted jabber: as it makes it easy to register (just get a gmail account) and they have a simple to use client available, but they failed in the fact that a lot of people don't fully understand that their Google Talk account is just a jabber account which can communicate with any other jabber server.

[Lastwebpage]

For you request about the client,
who want develop this new client?
Yes, you need a new one, imagine what would happens if PSI, or whatever, get the official client from jabber.org, what about the other clients in this case?
No sorry, I suggest to add a new vote column, like the column "Rating" at http://www.jabber.org/clients and name it "Difficultly level".

Peter