Our Website Design is Terrible

As a long-time Code Igniter user everything about this thread worries me.

From the design suggestions to the spec 'contest' idea. It's a conversation that may have had a place 10 years ago, but not today.

The brand is incredibly important - 'just a website' is pretty dismissive for a product that's used to build websites New users have a few seconds to judge the product, and if it looks like it's managed by a bunch of amateurs that's a serious issue (something the new owners are at least recognising…)

But… we're not in a bubble here, you want good examples you don't have to look far. Look at Laravel. Clean, modern, good architecture, to the point, well presented docs - this is good design. If you're falling short of that, your conversion will be suffering, because anyone reviewing this product will also be considering Laravel (and the many alternatives) - I cam across the new site by accident today and thought it was a domain scam. The current website isn't just 'bootstrap', it's an old version of bootstrap, with a bunch of crap design layered over it. Vanilla (new) bootstrap would have been infinitely better, something like Express.js.

Given the clear lack of design and IA experience from those that have posted so far (this isn't intended to belittle, nobody is good at everything, and I'm sure you're all fantastic developers) all I can recommend is reaching out to some actual UX peeps, otherwise you'll just end up with a slightly better crap website. Or just use vanilla bootstrap (the current version… v3).

For the sake of Code Igniter, please, please seek professional help with the design; not just design by comity in a forum (god help me…).