Well, I think this is very opinionated, even is the current dominating opinion is that cluttering is bad. Just compare with the world leader of ecommerce: Amazon main web pages (home, search results and product's page) are more than cluttered. The next ecommerce leaders do the same : eBay, AliBaba, etc. they all build cluttered websites.
Yes, they do. From a marketing point of view there is to consider that everyone knows them. And they have their value. So customers (like me) must accept what they offer as home pages.
But would a newcomer be a competitor if they have a clean and consise page? No. Because everyone knows why they to go to them - they have an ACME approach. You can get everything from them (what a newcomer can't ever offer). And we simply use the search function.
The next thing is that e.g. Amazon doesn't develop anything So they do not have to report "News".
Look at online news magazines. They are much different and less cluttered.
And please note that this is the exact opposite of design recommendations.
The design recommendation are usually for small web pages that want to compete with bigger ones.
But, let's discuss, what is your target ? curently, Haiku target developers, free-software enthusiasts and technical guys. Quite the same as GNUStep. The website design gives al theses users the feeling that Haiku is a very active project, even if the releases are separated by years.
I don't think the web page does this. It is the content shown on the web page. The design (i.e. colors, style, position of frames with content etc.) itself looks a little old fashioned to me.
And here we are with the target group: I think GNUstep is looking for more than developers, free-software enthusiasts and technical guys but users.
Keep in mind that a homepage with lot’s of stuff on it also needs a lot of regular maintenance, we just lack the resources for this (IIRC at the moment only Riccardo alone maintains the website).
The Haiku website is totaly automatised (build on Drupal).
That should of course be done for GNUstep as well but IMHO with a more modern "Look and Feel".
And if I try to abstract from Look and Feel there isn't much difference for all of them:
- there is a big title (bar)
- there is a menu bar with About, Community, Development, Documents, Download, Support, Wiki, Blog, ..
- may have submenus
- next is a bar with a short description, some Quick Access buttons (Haiku User Guide, ReactOS Builds, Report a Bug, ...)
- and maybe some picture or other important information (the Fundraising for Haiku, Screenshots for reactos and qemu)
- and then comes a "feed" of activities/news/blog posts, life activity - most likely automatically collected - this is missing for quemu
So is the discussing about content (structure, automation) or style (older or modern i.e. "sharp" vs. "soft")?
If we talk about content I'd say reactos and haiku are almost the same, qemu has a little less content for direct access.
So what about making the GNUstep home page look like a GNUstep "App"? With a menu bar, some NSImages, NSButtons, NSTableViews etc.? But GNUstep has themes...
-- hns