+1...all good, and something we had discussed early on. However, as I work on porting legacy info over, I am wondering what to do about the more "developer" centered areas of the site: api, sc, sw, framework, external (? -- I need to look at this one), tools,porting, and many others that are not really "user centered". I will load these into the ooo-site tree, but at some point, someone on the "developer" side should really cull this out and move them to the "developer" side so we don't continually deal with these areas on the "user portal".
On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> 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. > -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MzK "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." -- Mohandas Gandhi
