Hi Graham, > (I hope people will excuse me for posting this here as well as the wiki, but > it seems there is little if any discussion taking place there ) > > As the old saying goes "You can take a Horse to water but you can't make him > drink" > > And therein it seems, lies much of our problem. > > There is I believe a confusion of goals at the homepage. > > We are getting people to the download page but that is not the end goal. > You have to give the horse a reason to drink, Either, make him thirsty, make > the water desirable beyond his need for water or wait till he is thirsty > before you take him there.
My question is, what do users want - why do people come to the homepage? Do most visitors just come to upgrade/find out if there is a new version, or are most visitors new to OpenOffice and wanting to find out more? Either way, the download button is probably one of the most important elements on the website. > The three tenets of Marketing > *Create a need > *Create a desire > *Fill a present need > > Right now we do none of these well, we simply shove the Horse at the trough, > only to make it doubly difficult, we blindfold him, block up his nose and > force him to sup it through a straw after he has learned that drinking some > types of water.will be bad for him. That is true, and right now, the website lacks easy access (if the content even exists) to solid examples of OpenOffice. Maybe we could learn a lesson from commercial office suite websites and present things like Flash product demos or Flash product overviews that visually answer the questions, what is OpenOffice.org, what are its features, etc. > People come to a website for two main reasons > > *Curiosity > *To solve a problem > > They will leave for more reasons: > > *Their curiosity has been satisfied and they leave informed > *They find a solution to their problem > *They can't satisfy that curiosity within a reasonable time and they leave > frustrated > *They can't find the solution or it is not obvious and they leave frustrated > *Fear of the unknown > > Our problem is right now, and the discussions up to this point are reinforcing > this point, we are not asking the User what he wants to do we are telling > them what we expect them to do, We inform them where to download, but we > don't give them information that will make them feel comfortable about > hitting the download button, or to stretch our metaphor a bit further, we > talk to our horse about the trough but not about how good the water is, while > the horse is still worried about drowning.. > > So I've put together a draft of a front page continuing on the simplicity idea > which I'm a fan of. The difference is that we provide "Answers to the > Question" > > "You have arrived at OpenOffice.org what would you like to do now?" > > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg > > Native Language would be another answer if we don't get a users language from > their browser. I like oooauthors.org method of doing this, but I'm not sure > of the practicality of a page with 80 odd language choices. This would be the equivalent of a splash page, and would be bad in terms of 'how many clicks does it take you to get to the information you want'. Could we not have some sort of automatic geographic detection like so many websites have and automatically display the page in the language native to that country/region? Or a drop-down box with a selection of languages could appear somewhere on each page? > I like the Quintura "Mindmapping" method (www.quintura.com : type in a > search item you'll see what I mean) of giving choices perhaps we could figure > a way to narrow the choices by location. RE: the lots of information vs simplicity - perhaps we could fit in both with something like this: http://moofx.mad4milk.net/ (this example does not appear to be backwards-compatible - i.e. it doesn't work with JavaScript disabled, which is essential) The accordion layout would give us the opportunity to let the user choose what they want straight away - I want to learn about OpenOffice.org, I already have OpenOffice.org and need some help, etc. Each section could expand when the visitor clicks and provide numerous links that give quick and easy access to other pages. That way, the homepage could be both simple and rich in content. Plus, a little interactivity would enhance the homepage. Regards, Ivan. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
