Today we followed up our recent aquisition of alfresco.com with the quiet deployment of our two newly re-designed web sites.

We’ve made a big effort to cater to two distinct audiences (call them markets, if you like) with the new sites. Our company site at www.alfresco.com (although the www.alfrescosoftware.com also still works for backwards compatibility) has been overhauled to make it much easier to get at information about the Alfresco platform and the services we offer around it.

Some of the bigger changes we’ve made here are as follows:

• The creation of a five-step introduction to Alfresco, designed to help people get to know the product and featured prominently on the front page of the site
• An overhaul of the news feeds featured on the front page – we’ve added separate feeds for news stories, events and product updates so you can just get the news you want
• A complete re-design of the registration form for our basic online demo, and the addition of two new forms that allow you to register for our extended 30 day demo or our enterprise download trial
• Our training information (a key part of our strategy to introduce more people to Alfresco) has been brought up to date
• We’ve improved the general usability of the site by increasing font sizes and making links clearer
• Many other bug fixes and cosmetic changes…

Our community site at www.alfresco.org will become the focus for community activity around Alfresco. This has been through some even more radical changes, having been re-implemented from the ground up to give it a better fit with the look and feel of the company site.

• We’ve added a brand new downloads page that we hope will make it easier to get at the open source download you want faster
• We’ve started linking through to content that we already had in our wiki and other developer resources but hadn’t really publicised before – this marks the start of our pulling together of the developer/community content that we have scattered across various systems
• We’ve added a new community page where we’ll be providing a bit more information about how to get involved with Alfresco

The key thing is that this only marks the start of our efforts to improve our web infrastructure and we’ll be debuting a number of other changes in this area over the next few months. Stay tuned! 🙂