Re: [Fwd: Re: www.gtk.org]

["pat eyler" <p_eyler hotmail com>]

> From: Shawn T Amundson <amundson eventloop com>
> In my opinion, we need these sites:
>
>  * Users Site
>  * Foundation Site
>  * Developers Site
>    - CVS Site
>  * Software List
>  * News Site
>
> Obviously I probably have excluded something from this list and
> these sites already exist in some form or I would not have listed
> them at all.  I think listing these first is the important first
> step to figuring out the overall navigation.

This is where we could really start to use an information
architect ...

Just at a glance, I don't see a gtk Site, an office site, an
umbrella site to tie all of the sub-sites together, or templates
and tools for people interested in maintaining pages/sites for
software related to GNOME.  Some things to think about here would
be:

 * maintaining an overall theme to the sites, while keeping
   each site somewhat different
 * allowing some content to be duplicated on different sites
   without requiring each copy to be updated
 * keeping a convenient navigational system to move laterally
   or vertically through the site hierarchy.

(template driven content creation seems like a reasonable answer
 to the first two --it doesn't have to be dynamicly served though)

Does it make sense to think about a couple of kinds of users and how they 
would interact with the site?


> I think the duplication between www.gtk.org and developer.gnome.org
> needs to be avoided somehow.  developer.gnome.org seems to get more
> attention updating, but I'd bet that www.gtk.org gets more hits.
> And they duplicate a lot of things.  Perhaps we should combine them
> and only have one site?

Some duplication is fine (as long as the content is updated in one master 
location and pushed to all of the sites at the same time).  It certainly 
doesn't make sense to duplicate entire sites though.  The big thing to think 
about is how to let people easily navigate from one site to another and land 
in appropriate content.

> I think the GNOME news site should become www.gnotices.org.  This is
> an excellent name for the site and gives it it's own recognition value.

I disagree.  Spreading the GNOME sites across too many names tends to dilute 
the 'brand value'.  One way to make this work would be to open 
www.gnotices.org to all GNU projects, then display only the GNOME related 
topics at gnotices.gnome.org.  (This would also allow e.g. 
gnotices.gimp.org, gnotices.guile.org and the like.)

> I think the software list should be combine in some fashion with
> Advogato's project list.  I think strenghtening it on Advogato has
> more potential to help more projects than just GNOME alone, which
> is a win for everyone.
>
> I also think that it might be desirable to add to advogato so
> that we can put diaries of GNOME-related people on the developer's
> site.  Which would require being able to assign yourself as a
> general "GNOME developer" in advogato.  (But other categories should
> be added as well, so other projects can use this too, like Apache,
> KDE, etc., etc., etc.)

I like this idea.  It might also be nice to share articles/stories between 
advogato and gnotices ... not all stories are appropriate for all sites, but 
(looking at the wider spectrum gnotices above) there is certainly some 
overlap.

-pate


> -Shawn
>
> --
> Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson eventloop com
> Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
> EventLoop, Inc.                         http://www.snorfle.net/
>
> "The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
>  direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking

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