SUMMARY: you convinced me in one point and now I think that "Overview" is better than "Take the Tour" in the primary nav bar - see http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Navigation On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 22:54 +0200, Martin Jeppesen wrote: > thing I like about Screenshot is that, it is affiliated with > software, and that is what new visitors are looking for. Let's go deeper in the "Screenshots" thing. If we look at software websites in general we will realize that it's basically a solution used by free software websites devoted basically to free software users (and produced generally by the software developers themselves). Go to Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft, Apple or Adobe and you will see that they use screenshots in the context of an overview, but they don't call that section "Screenshots". Therefore I don't think "new visitors" are looking for "screenshots" even if they want to know how the software looks like (this is one of our use cases). IMO what happened is that most free software related websites (poor quality in general) had always a "Features" text-only page plus a "Download" page with source tarballs and packages. One day they realized how important it was to show the graphical interface and not only the code, and they added a page with screenshots with captions, generally with no connection to the features list. A patch. The good solution is to show the screenshots while explaining the features. But, wait, we are also questioning if we should communicate software features before user benefits [1]. This is why we should offer an overview (call it Tour or not) that should concatenate the benefits of using GNOME, combining text, images and perhaps short video demos as well. But we have also lots of free software users visiting our site, and many of them will be looking for "screenshots" at large. Right, let's have an explicit Screenshots gallery full of examples and eye-candy. It's visible in the now "Overview" secondary nav bar and we can think of setting a "Screenshots Gallery" link at the GNOME Slogan block in the home which features a screenshot itself. > "Take the tour" is often seen of big company websites, where all sorts > of products, not necessary software related, are showcased. > > "Take the tour" may therefore not lead the visitor to think there are > screenshots beneath. Good point. After some research I think that "Overview" is a better term to describe what we are offering there. > I understand your point, but I think that new possible users of > Gnome/Linux are primarily looking for software, so they might get > scared away by the community part of Gnome. Tour and videos would be focusing also on software, as the community thing might take just a slide/few secs of that. For the community stuff we have a Get Involved section in the primary nav and a Community subsite in the General bar. [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2006-July/msg00082.html -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://pinguino.tv
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