About the new Main Page you proposed, it seemed a bit too much trying to
repeat the efforts of the static homepage (which we are currently working
on). But then it is mainly about the headers used, not about the actual
content. Maybe you could try to make it look a bit more developer centric?
I admit that the sections "Get Software" and "Support" are misleading
into the direction of being a concurrent website main page. Maybe
renaming "Get Software" into "get latest development versions and moving
it to the button of the page would make this more clear. Also I'm going
to rename "Support" to "Developer Documentation", I think this is fine
with you.
please also take a look onto the http://development.openoffice.org page,
this page again is a painful long list of useful bookmarks and makes
clear that we deal with different target groups.
I have the impression that we could be better to address the needs of
our different target groups:
* End Users
what do they need to know: Where to download releases, where are the
user forumes, mailing lists, what are the options to get support.
* Administrators
what do they need to know: How to install on network, how to configure
and deploy, etc.
* Advanced Users
How to enhance OpenOffice.org: SDK, API, Extensions, Configuration
* Developer
This group can be devided into several parts
* Content contributing community
How to contribute graphics, template etc.
** Core Developer
how to dive into the core OpenOffice.org code
** QA Folks
how to do QA
** User Experience
how to contribute to UI/Workflow
** Documentation
how to contribute to this
** Localization
how to contribute to this
If we look into our current website structure some of these audiences
get well served but other not. We have some good structured projects
like native-lang, qa, marketing, but I doubt that the code project page
on the website are really used that often.
An example: we have less than 100 people subscribed on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list
(half of them developer lurking for user feedback) but we have about
1500 subscribers on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list. There are 12! pages
in sw on the website but I'd guess we have several 100 pages related
pages in the wiki related to the sw project. But nobody really will know
because of the missing structure in the wiki.
From my point of view (project lead for tools and porting) I'd like to
move most pages from the website into a wiki and consolidate the
remaining, often frequented pages into the development.openoffice.org
domain. This would just leave api, udk as visible projects (target
audience administrator, experienced users) with a lot of documentation
available.
I also propose urgently to revisit domain like support.ooo,
development.ooo and turn them from the large bookmark collection into
something more useful structure. The participate tab
(contributing.openoffice.org page might be an entry door to the ooo-wiki.
Yes, I agree this proposal might be a cultural change but I think it is
worth the effort as I think we could be more successful in getting new
contributors with some restructuring of some details of our site. We
already know that we are not that good as wanted in getting new
developer on board but my impression is that we are already not that
good on getting our users back to our website. Having several hundred
download a week but just having 1500 subscribers at the users list
subscribed seems to have chances to get improved.
Martin
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