Consolidating our .com and .org websites

Unknown
Unknown
in Sales & Marketing

In the beginning, we modelled many parts of our business on WordPress including having two websites: one for the open source product and community and one for the SaaS product. Over the years, the .org site has gained more search engine prominence due to the large number of OSS deployments and early press mentions. This has created a positive feedback loop where the .org gets mentions and links because when people research Vanilla, that's what shows up first. While OSS remains an important part of our business model, we want the world to see the SaaS product first.

Many other companies have gone through this and have dealt with it in different ways. Mindtouch (fka Dekiwiki) dumped the OSS project on Sourceforge and rebranded keeping no connection to their OSS product. Magento rebranded the OSS version to Community Edition and give it a single page on their website.

Last year, we refreshed the .org homepage to try and guide people to the right website but we still are surprised at how many people we talk to think that .org is our one and only website.

Our current plan is to redirect vanillaforums.org to a sub-domain of .com such as opensource.vanillaforums.com. The OSS homepage will be getting a refresh but the rest of the site will remain more or less the same.

We'll post a comprehensive explanation to the OSS community to let them know what and why we're doing this. The OSS community continues to make a meaningful contribution to the product and we don't want to create a false impression that we plan on ending support for OSS.

Comments

  • Vanilla Forums
    Vanilla Forums

    When we have access to our future "suite" and a widgetized home page, it will be extremely valuable for open source to have control over its homepage real estate to promote open source related information.

    I hope we use this transition to redirect the current splash page on the home page of vanillaforums.org to a marketing page and don't repeat it as the home page of the new subdomain. I think that's an important gain for the community, and if this move allows us to free up that space again, it can be much more easily positioned as a win for the community when we're communicating these changes.

    On a much smaller point, I'd also like to make sure we use a solid subdomain like "open" or "community" for this move. I particularly dislike the "oss" abbreviation - it obfuscates and sounds bad when spoken aloud. It's bad jargon to use in the site's branding.

  • Unknown
    Unknown

    Current plan:

    • vanillaforums.org will redirect to vanillaforums.com/software This page will look like a redesigned version of current .org home page. This page will help triage people to cloud or open source.

    • vanillaforums.org/discussions will redirect to open.vanillaforums.com (we have not picked the sub domain). So for now the forum will be the home page. In the future, we can build a better landing page.

    • Other pages on .org will be off the new sub-domain, for example, open.vanillaforums.com/download

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