Re: wgo pages

[Paul Cutler <pcutler foresightlinux org>]

Claus - this was very helpful, and really helped me visualize the changes you've recommended.

Lucas - I agree with your recap and suggestions below.

Marketing team - if you have a chance, please review Claus' recommendations at http://live.gnome.org/ClausSchwarm/WebNavigationDraft.

I'm going to do one more comparison to the last planned sitemap, as I think there are a handful of pages we can add, and send a recap out this afternoon (U.S.time) to the gnome-web and marketing lists with our proposed changes.

If you have any feedback, now is the time to speak up!

Thanks.

Paul

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org> wrote:

Hey,

Some quick comment bellow. Removed the parts I'm not replying to.

2009/5/26 Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>:

> 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.

Your suggestions look very good imo. I wasn't really happy with the
Renamed ones...

> 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.

Agree. Even though one of the things I wanted to see more on wgo (for
2.30 release) is a nice way to highlight all the cool apps that are
being created based on our platform and are part of the GNOME
ecosystem. Example: GNOME Do, Gwibber, GNOME Recipe, Banshee, F-Spot,
etc. Also, we must think of more meaningful ways of showing users how
to install those apps (other than pointing to a non-sense tarball,
which is indeed ridiculous). I also want to see GNOME "hotsites" about
specific topics like GNOME.Play (for media stuff) or GNOME.Office (for
productivity stuff), GNOME.Fun (about games, kids, etc), GNOME.Online
(for web integration stuff), etc. With a CMS, we can have easy ways to
create and maintain this kind of thing. This should be discussed later
(2.30) though. Now we should focus on the core elements of the
website.

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

I'd say we have two "institutional" products to sell: the desktop
*and* the platform. I think we're doing a really bad job on selling
both. Not sure yet how to organize the content around those products
but the important thing is that we don't mix content for developers
with content for users. In practice, this (obviously) means it should
be clear where to go depending on what you're looking for. One option
is to leave the 'About' with general content about GNOME as a project
(our mission, our goals, our history, who we are, etc) and have a
top-level section for Products (Desktop and Platform). I see things
like www.gnome.org/desktop and www.gnome.org/platform, dunno. So, the
Products section would only have points to Desktop and Platform pages.

So, the top-level navigation would be:

About
Products
Download
Support
Community
Contact

About would be:

About
   * """ Index provides short overview of the project (our mission),
desktop, platform. """
   * History
   * Foundation

And Products would be:

Products:
   * Desktop (www.gnome.org/desktop)
     * Why GNOME Desktop?
     * (Take the Tour)
           o (Slide 1)
           o (Slide 2)
           o (etc.)
     * Testimonials
     * Deployments (Success Stories)
   * Platform (www.gnome.org/platform)
     * Why GNOME Platform?
     * (Take the Tour)
           o (Slide 1)
           o (Slide 2)
           o (etc.)
     * Testimonials
     * Users (Success Stories from GNOME-based product developers)

Side note: I think selling a "desktop" is a very tough task as it's a
too abstract concept for end users. What they "see" is Ubuntu, Fedora,
openSUSE, etc, not a desktop environment running on an operating
system. Anyway, not saying it's not possible. Just making sure it's
clear to everyone that this is a challenging task which will demand a
lot of work and creativity to get right.

Cheers!

--lucasr