Hi, Quim! On Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:49:20 +0200 Quim Gil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> First I want to note that many user will drop in a product page > directly via Google if we do things right. > This is excactly what I'm worried about about: It's not a problem to move several pages in Google's hitlist for the search term "Evolution". However, it will be nearly impossible to get Evolution homepage into the top list for a search term like 'Email client' when a part of the crowd links the homepage and the other one links its product page. When I say "product page" I mean something similar to Jeff's suggestion: one, two or maybe three pages that have no more than one paragraph of text about a particular application. > Second, we will also have developers, sysadmins and decision-makers or > consultants with a tech profile wanting to know more about GNOME and > taking the time needed to gather the information and have their own > opinion about the decision that brought them there. > Yes and No. No, because they don't mind about some set of feature that makes Evolution different to other mail clients. They don't want to know how Nautilus handles file management; they expect file management to work! They don't need a wgo/apps/nautilus page. Those who have very special questions can easily check the project's homepage. No problem. However, when they google for something like evolution, they may get two hits that look like a homepage, and 50% of them are going to waste their time with the wrong one! But yes, they do need some more information: They wanna know how successful GNOME is in the market! If you care to look in the former navigation proposal, I had quite a few points in the About section to prove we are successful: The inital About index page lists some of our successes. There was a page planned what others say, listing quotes from journalists. We could have included a list of Awards -- unfortunately we seem to have won no awards (and a list of number 2 places looks, well, funny), so we better show a page about our largest deployments and case studies, instead. However, this is the information they are looking for! Dave Neary thankfully provided a quote that summerizes the main reason of institutional users very well: Concerning their choice of GNOME, Juan Conde, the director of the Guadalinex project, said: "We took the choice for two main reasons, one was [...] was the fact that our neighbour region, [...] Extremadura, had already chosen GNOME." http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/GnomeTestimonials#Andalucia In other words: The best selling argument for a desktop is that everybody else uses it! This is like driving on the left or on the right site of the road: It doesn't matter which site you're using as long as everybody uses the same side! And this is still the most objective reason to choose a desktop for nearly everybody. This is the impression we need to create: that we're cool and that we matter! Some product pages with rather detailed descriptions don't help here. They are just wasting everybody's time. > > > I'm not saying, some more pages to describe GNOME's products make no > > sense; just in case some people are *really* curious -- but these > > pages are not *that* important. > > If this few people are responsible of few big decisions, these pages > are important. > When I say 'product pages', I'm talking about the mockup I've send. Or maybe some larger version using Jeff's proposal of splitting it into desktop, dev. platform and embedded. Somebody just needs sents a list of points that these texts should address. The product pages I'm talking about have a short paragraph of text about the most important applications, only; not about all kinds of stuff like gcalculator that appears in the list of the "software map" which started this discussion. I mean you should know best: IIRC you wrote a blog entry about the feature differences of Firefox and Epiphany: It was a short list of points. To some people, these points may matter, but to the majority they don't. Most importantely: An institutional user won't care about these small differences when thinking about a 10.000 desktops deployment! They will simple use Firefox because the chances are rather high than many people are already familiar with it. Or just check gedit's homepage please: Its front section for users is already small -- why should we copy the information into the wgo content? Nobody's going to reason a 10.000 computer deployment on the features of an editor; and nobody's going throught all your product pages to make a list of the most important features. Of course, we could extend the text somehow: Maybe that will end into something like the apple/safari page: I've spend 30 seconds -- rather much for today's attention spans -- on the page; I still don't know whether this is an RSS reader or a browser. And I've found no download link. This is all I can remember, and this safari thingy didn't look particular exciting. I also don't know whether I get this safari thingy automatically if I buy a Mac. It might have been buried in the text desert over there. In other words, the page appears to be useless for its viewers. Don't let us waste our time with something similar, please! > > No, we haven't. We will have an agreement soon though, and you can > help getting a better agreement. We are not going to look for the > perfect list of use cases nor the perfect menu structure, we will be > happy finding better solutions than the ones wgo currently offers. > I don't critize that the proposal is not finished; I just wondering whether it makes sense to discuss content questions. Jeff's suggestion seems to be a content question: without a draft, this is hard to discuss any further. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
