Brief home sites review

I assume by "home sites" the assignment means the web presence of the CMS' we've looked at, and not the home pages of the repositories themselves. In any case, that's how I will be proceeding - by looking briefly at the web sites associated with EPrints, Drupal, DSpace, and Omeka.

It's hard not to be slightly biased because I prefer two of these (Omeka, Drupal) over the other two for my own collection. The home sites of all four were easy to find through a Google search, so accessibility is not an issue (and, of course, you only need to find the site once and add it to your "favorites"). The EPrints home page is as wordy as most of the collections that utilize it - not appealing. And the dense content actually makes what you're looking for harder to identify.

The Omeka site is pretty good - it's easy to find repository examples, user forums are prominent, and news and download options are easily identifiable. It looks like a site that is well thought out and organized. I like it better than Drupal's site which (although I like the product) doesn't look great and feels a little disjointed. The map identifying the global locations of people posting issues seems like overkill and doesn't add anything. I think this content should be left in the forums. The Drupal site also looks dated compared to other sites, which is surprising considering how many attractive sites have been designed with Drupal. Fortunately there are plenty of links to content that most developers would need, so I'm sure one could get used to the site pretty quickly if using Drupal for a production repository.

Finally there's DSpace, whose home page almost includes too little information. In fact, a weakly worded sentence is the only indication of what DSpace even does. Of course, there are links to other content, but the home page should include more, look better, and advertise the product more clearly. Like Drupal, the product deserves better than the home page that supports it. And, again like Drupal, the home site looks old and boring.

Obviously this is a pretty superficial analysis based entirely on first impressions. From a developer perspective, I'm not sure how much these observations matter. Anyone actually using any of these platforms would become intimately familiar with these sites, and would probably care less how they looked. I think from a marketing perspective they should look more modern and clean (only Omeka does a good job of this right now) but it's not critical. Organization is important, and would be a consideration for those debating which CMS to use for their repository, but it would probably be outweighed by the robustness of the product itself, assuming one can find what they need without too much inconvenience.