it sounds like a Déjà vu and i think we had already a discussion that
goes in this direction.
Yes, i totally agree on this separation and it makes sense to me. Moving
forward with this separation we need much less migration and can
concentrate on the most important pages of the main portal (for users)
www.openoffice.org.
Hopefully we can change wiki.services.openoffice.org to
wiki.openoffice.org and can redirect the old Url to the new short one.
and the same for the forum users.services.openoffice.org
The portal side provide the main info about the product (mainly
marketing material), provide the download (with the infra structure
behind), but also provides the entry points to the wiki, to the forum
and of course openoffice.apache.org for project members.
I really like that
Juergen
On 11/22/11 12:46 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
We have with this project something that most other Apache projects
don't have and which the legacy OOo project never had. We have two
independent websites.
We have the legacy www.openoffice.org website, which served as an
end-user portal for OpenOffice as well as a website for project
participants.
And we have the http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/, which on
graduation probably becomes something shorter, like
http://openoffice.apache.org. For most Apache projects their website
also serves both purposes: a site for users as well as project
participants.
So, we have both of these websites, and a lot of redundancy caused by
it. This obviously has a downside. It makes it hard to update, since
a lot of information is in both places. And it confuses users since
the websites are out of sync on some important topics. It also
prevents us from really optimizing the experience for each audience.
I suspect that long-term this dual-website with overlapping content is
not a maintainable model.
What can we do?
I hope I am not committing heresy if I say that most users of
OpenOffice care as little about Apache as drinker of a Pepsi cares
about the Board of Directors of PepsiCo Corporation. The average user
(and we're talking about millions of them) cares about downloading,
installing, using, learning about and generally being productive with
OpenOffice. It is a tool they use to do their work. Their work is
what matters to them, not our work.
But of course we also have a growing number of users, contributors and
committers who want to get more involved with the project. OpenOffice
is interesting to them. They identify with it. They want to learn
more than just the basics. They are intrigued by open source. They
want to help. They want to get more involved.
The trick I think, is to have websites that speak to each of these
audiences, as well as an easy/obvious way to navigate between them,
while at the same time avoiding unnecessary cross talk and redundancy.
For example, could we have something like this:
1) www.openoffice.org is the website for the OpenOffice product. It
is the end user site, focused on their interactions with the product.
So download, help, extensions, support. It is not how they interact
with the project. It serves the narrow focus on the product.
2) incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg (eventually
openoffice.apache.org) on the other hand is where the project members
work and where the public (includiing users) interacts with the
project. Not the product, but the project.
This dual website is quite commonly used for managing large and
important brands. For example, the consumer, when interfacting with
the brand Pepsi and Pepsi products goes to:
http://www.pepsi.com
But the person who wants to learn more about the company goes to another URL:
http://www.pepsico.com/
Navigating between then is possible via a link on the page footer.
But generally each site is optimized for its target audience.
