Matthew Toseland schrieb: > On Tuesday 13 May 2008 05:44, Ian Clarke wrote: >> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:21 PM, Florent Daigni?re >> <nextgens at freenetproject.org> wrote: >>> Well what's the solution then? To make Matthew work on the website? to >>> send a call for help on @announce (possibly a better phrased than mine)? >>> >>> Shall I forget about the drupal vhost right-now and delete it? >> Definitely not, its a good experiment, and may yield good results. >> >> I think you are right that none of us are good web developers, and >> frankly its going to be hard to find some web development genius to >> give his time to re-architecting the website. >> >> I think the key is to take advantage of open source, to find a good >> design that is released under a free license (perhaps GPL, perhaps >> creative commons, maybe something else), and use it, perhaps with a >> few minor modifications (logo, color scheme, etc). >> >> I've suggested looking at the Mozilla project, because they release >> their websites under creative commons, and they have some pretty good >> web-designers. Of course we should look elsewhere too. >>
I don't think funding depends on how our website looks, at least not directly. I still am not convinced that a Mozilla-like design would fit our project, although I have to admit there are a few things we could improve (e.g. a simple summary on top of each page, so the user doesn't have to read through the whole techspeek). We never could do a landing page like getfirefox which gives almost no information on the setup process, because Freenet is not as easily set up, it's not plug'n'play, you have to adjust a few settings. Apart from the installing process Freenet is not yet another colourful designer application, it's software that is meant to provide you anonymity and security against censorship. It's not like candy it's medicine, it should look different because if it doesn't people could get careless, but it doesn't have to taste bitter. >> We need to find a way to have a professional looking website, without >> a) having to build it from scratch ourselves and b) having to spend >> any of our precious donations on building it. Taking advantage of >> open source HTML and CSS code seems like the natural answer to this. > > As nextgens pointed out recently, our current website has a 40% conversion > rate - that is, 40% of our unique visitors downloaded Freenet. Given the > level of political baggage and technicality that Freenet inevitably comes > with, that suggests that the website is not the biggest problem facing us. > > No? > > IMHO the bigger problem is user retention. And how do we get better user > retention? > - More content. > - Better performance. > - A usable chat client. (Whether or not we choose to spend project resources > on this, IMHO it will result in higher user retention). We don't need to attract nerds, they are already on Freenet (at least a part of them). We need to attract artists, normal users, and other people (they will bring in some new content) so we have to find out about use cases which actually would provide them with some functionality which they can't get elsewhere and which is a really useful for them and then we have to build the software which makes it happen. We have to give them reasons to use Freenet, not only give them no reason not to use it. The question should be "Why should I use Freenet?" not "Why shouldn't you use it?" Also we should explain the difference and the advantage between Freenet and Tor better and in a well visited place (e.g. the whatis.html), there are many users who think Freenet provides the same core functionality as Tor and therefore use Tor (I don't mean to bring up a flamewar against Tor but we have to clarify what the difference is and why it may be useful to have both systems installed). Apart from that we should have an ungeekish way to provide support to people having questions about Freenet. IRC is definitely a bit geekish and not everyone would subscribe to a mailinglist. But everyone who's on the web knows how to use forums. Yes I know I don't really like them either but ask yourself "would your mother subscribe herself to a mailinglist?" she probably wouldn't. A functionality we could easily provide with the new CMS. Also we have to get rid of our filesharing image. I know you can do filesharing over Freenet but it's not the right place to get the latest blockbuster (one reason is because it's too slow). The current situation is that those who think Freenet is yet another filesharing app (but with better security) and who approve of that get disappointed and those who disapprove it don't want to have it for that reason but if they had tried maybe they found out it was the right thing for them. We should emphasize this more on upcoming press releases. For the killer application chat client talk to saces, he had a prototype of some java app called minichat which actually could exchange messages in almost real time (few seconds delay (<<10s), I guess with ULPRs it's even less). The app is based on his message system Freeze (slogan "cooler than Frost") which he started programming when the DOS on Frost began (the first versions where published before we knew about FMS). Freeze is a Freenet plugin (no port needed) has some features like queue forking and so on and it should be possible to use a WoT on it (we have talked about some nice ideas about entering the WoT), it is designed to use GPG as encryption/signing (I think there where more cool features but I understood only half of it). We also talked about maybe doing a hybrid plugin which can talk Freeze and FMS, then we could migrate our users softly over to Freeze. Well talk to him if you need to know more. regards Neo at NHNG -- Follow the blue rabbit - The Freenet Project - http://freenetproject.org/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 252 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080513/a9671cd8/attachment.pgp>
