Have you tried to learn more about Polkadot like a new user? Forget everything you know and search 'Polkadot' and whichever term you would want to get detiails like 'ink', 'smart contract', 'interoperability', 'cross-chain', or 'xcm' and see how much you can access and learn.
2 out of 3 times I ended up on a 404 error page, which was frustrating and quite annoying. Most developers would have deemed Polkadot as 'stupid' and moved on to the next blockchain to evaluate.
BEFORE WE SPEND ANOTHER DOT ON MARKETING, we need to get our ducks in a row and make sure we have a compete and superb end to end experience for new users (devs). From the Polkadot homepage to spinning up their first local node, making first Ink! Smart contract, or learning the first lessons on Substrate.
We must go beyond making sure the info is there or not 404 errors — we need to have 'complete experiences' on the new Polkadot site for visitors going to that site. Most of us have not even been on the new site and most visitors are new users seeking to learn more.
We need to provide the best and most relevant information to those visitors and stop linking to multiple locations — that's the worst user experience that can get confusing and overwhelming. A user should not have to click more than 3-4 times to get to the info they are seeking and should not be linked to multiple external pages from the Polkadot site.
i need up on Substrate and some other Polka...(can't recall the last part of the name) page that was a dead end — but after closing those windows Polkadot page was gone and I moved on with other work.
We are losing opportunities everyday — I guarantee it. Most developers have to learn substrate, unless they started coding it from college — but realistically for exusting businesses, entrepreneurs, or startup companies — they need to learn and documentation must be up to date, organized and easily accessible. Don't make the new user figure it out themselves — we must cater to their needs and help them commit to building on Polkadot. We are not in the position to have the figure it yourself attitude because there's 20 other more humble, aggressive and hungrier blockchains waiting for devs to leave our site.
Too many treasury funded projects claiming to improve UI/UX just made landing page/medium style web sites that link off to GitHub or the Polkadot wiki page. That's not what we need — we have too many already.
Where are marketing campaigns linking users to — where do all of the KOLs use to drive traffic? That should be defined and used consistently for every campaign — once it has been made or completed.
i like the ERC made by Distractive — the optimal choice would be a Developer Portal and on the official site, the notion site would be 2nd choice — as long as we can provide the end to end experience for new users.