On Mar 20, 2014, at 3:27 AM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Knowing what I know of professional web designers, this amounts to > a licence to jazz up the site. To be clear, I'm not objecting to your analysis, which I found to be helpful. I'm just reacting to several subsequent messages that didn't add anything, but expressed concern about "bells and whistles" without giving any advice for how to avoid trouble. My personal opinion is that the IETF web site isn't really all that useful to IETF participants. I use it to find info about meetings, and mailing lists, but otherwise rely on datatracker. My reason for stating that was to see if anybody disagreed. You've already said that you don't use the main site, and several other people have said that they rarely use it either. So there's certainly a case to be made that the front page could change quite a bit without causing inconvenience to regular IETF users. I am hoping that this assertion will attract loud objections if I am mistaken. BTW, my wife is a professional web designer, has a horror of Flash, and seems to design pretty nice, spare, usable sites. And she usually takes advantage of work other web designers have released into the public domain in order to do this. I think it's important that we be clear about what we want, and any lack of clarity in the SOW should be addressed. That is, after all, why we were asked to review it. But I do object to characterizations of web designers as a class being irresponsible children who cannot be trusted to produce a usable site when asked to do so and given a clear spec.