GNOME.org
 

Re: wgo pages

Yes, sure.

First, there are not so many differences between to Top-Level Navigation
of both suggestions. This is easier to see when one uses similar
phrases:

Orginal         Renamed
----------------------------
About           Take the Tour
Download        Get Started
Support         Get Help
Community       Get Involved
Contact         (About)

I think, my original phrases are easier to understand, and perform
better with Search Engines. But that's just a minor detail.

Second, Quim's suggestion as described here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Navigation and used by
http://gnome.rehfisch.de/ uses basically _two_ Top-Level Navigation
Bars. I believe the rationale was to have "short-cuts" to common
resources, but seriously: Bookmarks have been invented in the last
century.

Third, the main problem with Quim's suggestion is that it tries to
provide too much information about too many (different) products and
thus fails to sell any of them. Typically, the usual guideline for
people selling on the web is "One Product => One site". Or at least,
"One Product => One Page".

This is why I argued years ago to have a separate projects.gnome.org
domain. It took Murray nearly a year to understand why this makes sense.
Just recently, for example, I noticed the announcement of a new Dia
version on reddit.com. It pointed to the mailing list announcement! And
that one pointed to a FTP server with Tarballs!

Seriously, you can't expect users to trust in the Linux ecosystem when
stuff like that happens. And it would have been as bad as if it pointed
to www.gnome.org/products/ or www.gnome.org/products/dia. We simply
don't have the resources to keep wgo up to date with all the products
and projects.

Thus, my suggestion tries to sell the desktop on wgo, only.

Of course there will be pointers and links to all the other products:
applications, mobile or the development platform. These target groups,
however, are experienced web users. They know how to use bookmarks.

I think this is less confusing. With the old suggestion, we basically
have some product information under "Products", some sales information
under "Take the Tour" and "Success Stories", different kinds of tips
under "Get Started", etc.

As a result, I believe the current "primary" bar is confusing --
especially if you drop the "general" bar.

For another example: If you're looking for a user group in your
language, would you consider "Contact" to be the most likely Top-Level
Navigation to click? I wouldn't.

And if the Design team users indeed a column layout for the footer,
we'll have plenty of additional space for "important" links in the
footer. For example, instead of making "Sponsors" a Top-Level, I'd
suggest to have their logos in the footer.

I'll try to provide a more complete layout of the navigation later.


Best regards,
Claus






On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 08:49 -0500, Paul Cutler wrote:

I think this is all good information, and I agree with Claus on a
number of points, but I'm really struggling in making this actionable.

I think this paragraph is the one confusing me, from Claus' email:

"The first-level pages are basically index pages, identical to the
current wgo "Support" and "Community" pages and also similar to
Maemo's
top pages. The second-level pages are supposed to become sales pages,
that is: Each ends with a Call-to-Action and provides benefits to do
so."

Our deliverable for tomorrow is a recommendation on the sitemap,
specifically what pages on http://gnome.rehfisch.de/ would we want to
add, remove or update?  Content is not due yet, and we have time to
figure out the call to action on those pages.

Claus, I did download the files you provided.  Could you take a look
at the test site above, which has the site layout previously agreed
to, and let us know your thoughts compared to the mockup you created?

Thanks.

Paul

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Claus Schwarm
<clschwarm googlemail com> wrote:
        On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 10:38 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
        
        >
        > Hear, hear on thinking about what we want people to do when
        they visit
        > wgo! (We also need to keep in mind why they came so we can
        make the
        > visit satisfying.
        
        
        Yes, it's not an either/or question. We should do both.
        
        >
        > I agree, that #4 is the main one and the others are all
        good.
        >
        > I'd rename (4) to be "Use GNOME".  When we take them to that
        page, in
        > addition to an install option, we need to have options for
        the non
        > technical person. That may include pointing them to Linux
        distros or
        > to the non-app store we talked about in another thread.
        >
        
        
        I think, there's a slight difference between "install" (or
        deploy) on
        the one hand, and "use" on the other: The product itself. If
        people
        don't like the product, there's nearly no way to encourage
        people to
        keep it installed and use it.
        
        The "download" page provides all the options you mentioned:
        Links to
        Distros, LiveCDs, and other stuff. It's an index page, so we
        can easily
        add a paragraph -- to a GNOME-for-Windows CD, for example, or
        whatever.
        
        A link to the non-app store (coffee mugs and stuff) might fit
        into
        "Community". It also seems to be a good candidate for the
        footer.
        
        >
        >
        >         To get people to deploy GNOME, we need to persuade
        them to
        >         install and
        >         test GNOME, first.
        >
        > Again, I think we'll have people coming with questions but
        not be
        > technical users. Maybe instead of "install" it's switch. For
        example,
        > they already have a Linux distro and they're using KDE. For
        the
        > average Windows user, we need to send them somewhere to get
        > GNOME/Linux easily.
        >
        
        
        Hm, maybe there's a slight misunderstanding here?
        
        When I write "install and test" I'm NOT talking about playing
        around
        with tarballs. I mean "Get a Ubuntu CD and run it from the
        existing
        Windows partition", for example.
        
        Non-technical people (that is "Beginners and non-frequent PC
        users") are
        unlikely to visit wgo, anyway.
        
        > So the question I have (which we might not be able to
        answer) is do we
        > get people that are already using GNOME or do we get Windows
        and KDE
        > users? I'd guess a huge percentage of our traffic is
        existing GNOME
        > users. So our "install/use" case might be getting them to
        use more
        > GNOME apps.
        >
        
        
        We don't need to distinguish between people using GNOME and
        people using
        something else. People don't read web pages, they scan them:
        Information
        that appears to be irrelevant or uninteresting is usually
        ignored.
        
        So, existing GNOME users will probably ignore "About" and
        "Download" and
        jump straight to "Support" or "Community". There are links to
        further
        information -- where to find additional GNOME apps, for
        example.
        
        They are also likely to use Bookmarks for GNOME sites they use
        often.
        
        Selling a certain GNOME app is best left to the homepage of
        the app.
        Stuffing too much information on a web site usually makes it
        confusing
        and hard to navigate.
        
        BTW, the web site mock-up needs no web server or so. Just
        download
        extract, and open the first index.html in the browser. The top
        navigation should work.
        
        
        Best regards,
        Claus
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