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The first website for Joyent firmly established our commitment to user friendly design. A collaboration between Joyeurs – John Gruber, Bryan Bell, David Young, and outside designer Cameron Moll, and the extraordinary illustrator Paige Pooler.
Joyent.com circa October, 2005 told the story of the collaboration suite on an appliance premiered at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad of that year. Jill was a small business owner who couldn’t be bothered by the local IT guy. Joyent wanted to sell Jill an appliance filled with collaboration software she would just plug into the wall and, viola, Jill moves on to the next challenge.
So much has changed since then. We dropped the appliance and went to the hosted model. The customer base expanded beyond small business to small teams. We listened, we morphed, we changed. And that’s good news.
In late 2005 Joyent and TextDrive merged. The idea was applications and hosting belonged together. But even this was just the beginning of the idea. The debut of Accelerators in the Summer of 2006; BingoDisk in late Summer, 2006; the release of version two of Joyent’s collaboration suite in late 2006; and Joyent Core this past January underscored Joyent is more than just a software-as-a-service company.
Joyent is a new kind of infrastructure company providing on-demand applications, compute, storage, and services to teams around the world. The website needed to be updated to talk about this while re-emphasizing our commitment to user friendly design while effectively introducing Joyent and its vision to our customers and partners.
And there is more Jill. Note: the new joyent.com comes with 74% more Jill. Thanks to Paige Pooler for the inspiration put into the original Jill. We’ve also introducing Terence in the roll of Accelerator spokesperson. (Note: the whole cartoon cast of Joyent from 2005 includes, left to right: Jill, the boss; Yolanda, designer; Nadine, account manager; Terence, designer/programmer; Otto, sales; and Evelyn, bookkeeper.) I’m afraid we now outsource our illustration needs, like most of the cartoon business, to…Bakersfield, California.
I hope you’ll find the new joyent.com useful. Thanks for your continued support.
39 Comments
Looks nice. Hope it all comes well for you… and us of course. Patience is a virtue.
Congratulations on the new site guys, looks really awesome, nice job.
The rollout might not be totally complete, but some early comments:
The Accelerator link in the footer should link to the Accelerator page. (/accelerator)
The individual team member pages serve up a Radiant CMS 404 error page. See David Young as an example—http://joyent.com/team/davidpaulyoung/.
Your feed advertised on the throughout the site (/rss/) returns a Radiant 404 error page.
Well done, the site looks fantastic. Excellent illustration work as well!
Layout is broken on IE 6 (don’t ge me started on why I have to use it here)
@ Koz, Thank you
@ Niall, thank you the Accelerator link was corrected, rss advertisement is gone, and yes the /team/ links are “legacy” links (they’re on old business cards) and rewrites need to be put in place.
@ Jens-Christian, I’m not sure that Bryan cares.
Is Dean no longer with Joyent? I don’t see him here: http://joyent.com/about/management-team/
Love the art work … including the little touch of the file drawers resembling the Thumpers (X4500).
Nice touch …
Send my thanks to whoever wrote the Quick Connect Guide.
Wicked cool! Love the design guys, and the illustrations are top notch! I’m curious—is the TextDrive.com website going to disappear sometime now that Connecetor is… connected?
This is gorgeous, crew. A huge applause for those involved.
(Was this Bryan’s doing?)
>> “The debut of Accelerators in the Summer of 2006; BingoDisk in late Summer, 2006; the release of version two of Joyent’s collaboration suite in late 2006; and Joyent Core this past January underscored Joyent is more than just a software-as-a-service company.”
I don’t understand, how does this make Joyent more than just a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company?
Am I not correct in saying that Accelerators, BingoDisk, Connector and Joyent Core are all services.
@ Dan, yes
@ Cameron, yes it was Bryan.
@ Jake, yes accelerators are a service, but they’re hardware as a service, not just software.
Love the new layout, really slick. One more issue noticed, on the Accelerators page, the “Latest News” in the left sidebar has a white shadow which I’m quite sure isn’t meant to be there.
My only other complaint is that I don’t find the plain blue links on e.g., the main page, work for me. They don’t match anything else on the page, and look out of place.
Otherwise really slick new redesign.
Wow! I wish I looked that good. – Otto
Design Bug:
On the Connector page (http://joyent.com/connector), when you hover over the orange “Get Connected” button, in FireFox (WinXP), once hovered – the text of “Get Connected” expands horizontally.
Hi everyone, thank you all for your feedback on the new site – especially letting us know about bugs you encounter. We tried to squash those rascals before we launched, but well, obviously we didn’t get them all. I will take the blame as the ‘new girl’ who is too Type A for her own good.
We are diligently working to correct it all now, so if you come across anything else – let us know ASAP – which doesn’t seem to be a problem for most of ya.
You can leave comments here or by sending an email to kristie [at] joyent [dot] com. Cheers.
Excellent work, as always. But, does this count as strutting?
The site looks awesome in FF, but IE 6 looks aweful. Super messed up. Good job guys n gals!
Here’s a screenshot: http://senduit.com/bf2d22
Welcome Kristie !
and great new site !and I’m quite sure you mean “Pernod” instead of “Pernoud” on the about page, don’t you ?
@Arnaud – yes, guess I should stop drinking the Pernod before I try writing website copy. LOL
I must say ‘job well done’ Joyeurs – you have correctly found the errors that I (cough) intentionally (cough) placed throughout the site.
So now my Marketing research is complete. In answer to the big question – Yes. People do still read Web copy. And check your links. And view the source.
Boy, I see now you folks are going to keep me on my toes. I guess it is a good thing I have a closet full of stilettos.
Ok, keep it coming – I can take it.
@taco: we won’t support IE6. Sorry.
RE: we won’t support IE6. Sorry.
Sorry to hear this, not all of us have the option to choose what we browse with throughout the day.
You have a bollixed agreement to fix:“We’ve also introducing …”in the 6th paragraph.
It looks too nice to have that…;-)
David, you’re kidding about IE 6, right…?
@ Joe, I’m afraid he’s not, we dropped support for IE6 in our applications.
Man, I don’t blame you. IE6 is the bane, bane, bane of my existence, and basically, I’m to the point of not caring how my stuff looks (bizarre in some cases) in that browser.
Congrats on having the guts to kiss it goodbye.
Re: we won’t support IE6. Sorry.
Don’t be. I have waited so long to hear someone say this. IE6 is broken. Let’s hasten its death. Let’s hope it becomes a trend…
http://help.joyent.com/ lost its CSS
I love that you don’t support IE6. Did you drop support for IE completely is the question?
We support IE7 fine.
Looking good guys. and if it weren’t for jill, nadine would look hot too.
I don’t use IE at all, but face the facts – lots people use it. The fact that you don’t support IE6 from a layout perspective is just amature. I can see from an application standpoint, but not for things as simple as CSS. Good luck with that.
for you grammarians,yes type-o: amateur
ps. not crabbing, love the design. again, great job!
Just an image question. The large header images are PNGs? Just wondering why. I grabbed homeCoverSheet.png as an example, and it looks to weigh in just over 140K. Is there a reason it couldn’t be a JPG? The same image as a very high quality JPG is about 75K and I can’t see any difference between the JPG and PNG. Maybe it was a print page issue, or a color issue?
Thanks for mostly fixing the layout of Joyent site in IE 6. I appreciate that.
Loving the new redesigned joyeur site as well!
Good question tadacip viva