Intro and thoughts

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

OK, I probably should introduce myself as well.

I'm probably vaguely familiar to many of you as one of the people
behind GTK+, Pango, and such things.

But besides that, I also do a good chunk of the sysadmin work on the
gnome.org machines. (I work at RHAD labs which has hosted gnome.org
for the last several years, so if one of the machines goes down at
7:00 am Sunday morning, I may well be the person driving out there.)


Areas of the web sites I've particularly worked on:

 - developer.gnome.org. (I helped design and implement it along
   with some of the other people at RHAD labs.)  

 - mail.gnome.org. I did most of the assembly of this
   mailman+mhonarc+namazu setup.

 - www.pango.org. An attractive design for a small amount of
   information, if I say so myself, but not well kept up to date. :-(
   This site may also be worth moving into the developer.gnome.org
   umbrella.

I don't think I'll be doing enough of the work for my language
preferences to matter. I'm basically comfortable with anything,
though the more standard tools like CVS and make are used, the
easier it will be for GNOME developers to help out with web
site maintenance. 


With that said, here are some high-level thoughts onr the gnome.org
websites.

 * gnome.org should be:

    - A place for users and others to find out about GNOME
    - A place for programmers to obtain out the information 
      they need to develop with the GNOME platform
    - A place for coordinating the work of the GNOME project.

   We can roughly say that currently www.gnome.org and news.gnome.org
   handle the first function, developer.gnome.org and www.gtk.org
   the second one, and parts of developer.gnome.org and 
   foundation.gnome.org on the third function.

 * gnome.org should concentrate on providing information,
   not trying to attract visitors merely for the sake of attracting
   visitors.  

 * We need to keep the barrier to updating the web site as low
   as possible, since that has been the biggest problem
   so far.

 * Even now we have a lot of information, and that amount
   of information is only going to grow. Navigation is the
   aspect of web site design that we should pay most attention
   to.

   To give a concrete example, while developer.gnome.org won't win any
   awards for graphics design, I think it does pretty well in this
   aspect:

    - It gives the user a sense of where they are in the
      site at (almost) all times.

    - It provides multiple paths to information

       - direct navigation through the tree on the left
       - navigation though the links in the architecture section
         (this could be brought out more)
       - the site map

    - Its fast to load and graphically light so it is easy to browse
      around quickly.

   I'd hope that any redesign of d.g.o would keep these features.

 * The gnome.org web infrastructure will contain many small
   "sub-communities"

     - www.gtk.org
     - www.gnome.org/gnome-office
     - developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp
       [...]

   It is important that these sub-communities share consistent
   graphical and navigational elements with the larger site,
   but also are distinctively customized and feel more
   or less self-contained.

   themes.org does reasonably well with this graphically, though the
   pages have more homogenous structure and content than we'll have
   for gnome.org.


Going over the web sites to write this mail brings home to me that we
really have a huge amount of content we are providing and can provide
in the future. I think its just a matter of figuring out how to
present and maintain that information in a convenient and attractive
form.

Regards,
                                        Owen