[haiku-web] Re: [openbeos] Re: New website home page mockup
- From: "Waldemar Kornewald" <wkornew@xxxxxxx>
- To: "Haiku Website" <haiku-web@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 13:10:31 +0200
Hi,
sorry for the long mail. I just tried to be more convincing than "I
prefer to have it like that."
On 8/29/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Removing the Forums entries may be OK, but not the Documentation Updates.
One of the requirements of the new website was to make progress more
obvious, and the documentation has been identified as a key area of the
project. It is therefore important to show progress being made in this
area as well. This box does just that.
Still, this doesn't mean that you should overload the website with too
much progress. Also, I think it is more than sufficient to only show
new developer articles (developer planet). Why would users come to our
site to see that we changes something in the Haiku User Book? I think
that this cannot be seen as progress.
> * simplify the development section on the front page
What is there to simplify being that developers are our key targets at
this point in time?
* Our developers don't really use IRC. That information can go away
from the front page (it's available via an FAQ).
* As Axel pointed out, we don't really have a single development
mailing list. Every developer must subscribe to the main list, but he
also must subscribe to his team's list (we should make this obvious or
people will start asking team-specific questions on the main list).
The "Getting Started" article has everything that is needed (including
downloads of the development tools), so we should only link to that
article.
* If we already link to "Getting Started" we don't really have to link
to "Get development tools" (it's on the same page).
* I'm not sure about the repos browser. Personally, I often used the
one on FreeBSD's website and I always wished it would be more easily
accessible. Also, when I want to fix a bug I often use the repos
browser before downloading the source (just to see if it's not too
ugly for me ;).
So, I'd suggest to reduce it to:
* Download development build
* Getting started
* Browse repository
These are the most important links and nobody can misunderstand
anything (like IRC being used by our devs or the main list being the
place to ask about team-specific questions).
> (and later it
> should go away, completely)
This will be determined depending on the needs of the project. Let's not
try to predict the future. :-)
I'm just being optimistic. :)
> * reduce the number of quick-links on the front page
Doing as you suggest goes against our specific goals of exposing more
content and showing more progress.
Our primary goal was to show more progress.
Having more content on the website is important, too, but this doesn't
mean we should have everything on the front page. People coming to our
website have a specific goal (I'll mention them below) and we must
optimize the site for those tasks without disturbing anyone.
If the front page is too overloaded you will distract people from
their primary goal and they will get frustrated (and start ignoring
the front page). You can't make people scan the front page for more
than two seconds or they will start to forget why they came to our
site. It will move out of their focus because they must orientate
themselves and this can be very frustrating because it's not what you
initially wanted to do (you feel like someone forced you into this
situation where you lose time with searching a page).
Please don't forget that we will show lots of other interesting
content (news, developer articles) which will distract the user more
than enough.
If you still don't believe me (if you do, please skip two paragraphs ;):
Let's do a little demonstration. Imagine you want to play a game which
requires the latest version of DirectX. Please go to the MS website
and download it (hey, you want to play the game, now!):
http://www.microsoft.com/
Please stop reading here and do the task, first.
* Now, tell me which path you chose.
* What were the first two screen locations on the front page you
looked at (please be serious)?
* Did you have the impression that you spent a lot of time (too much
time) on the front page? What were your emotions while searching for
DirectX? Frustration? Anger? Nothing?
* Was it helpful that the website has so many quick-links?
I hope that this experiment was a successful demonstration:
Quick-links can slow you down considerably and even make the website
frustrating to navigate if there are too many of them.
Now, let's go back to our visitors' goals:
* What is Haiku? Or maybe: What is this website about?
* What's the latest news?
* How can I become a Haiku developer?
* How can I do ... (install Haiku, use the Interface Kit, develop an
application, etc.)?
People who don't know Haiku should get a quick intro (which doesn't
disturb regular visitors, so it shouldn't be too long). That's what
you did, too. I just think it could be easier to read and more
concise. Additionally, it should list a few of our most important
goals (or we won't stick out of the Linux crowd).
Regular visitors are interested in news and developers want to know
about API changes and development progress, so these two types of
articles should be on the front page (News and Developer's Planet).
Additionally, we mention important events like the icon contest or
WalterCon. Again, it's part of your mockup, but you don't really have
to list every link to the icon contest. One link per event is
sufficient (more would be overloaded).
Since our current focus is the developer we should make it easy to get
started, so let's put those three very important development links on
the front page, too:
* Download development build
* Getting started
* Browse repository
This is sufficient to make newcomers happy (I wish other websites
would have this!). You don't really need more.
That's it. The last goal I mentioned is so extremely specific that it
should be part of a subpage and we should of course link to related
pages (e.g.: when downloading you also want to know how to install
Haiku). I'm sad that the algorithms on our website are not good enough
to automatically recognize inter-related articles with high accuracy.
It might be good enough for most developer articles, though (I found
it interesting when looking through the RFCs). We could only enable it
for developer articles.
Related reply:
On 8/29/06, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Waldemar Kornewald" <wkornew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> * emphasize important words in the intro text (similar to the current
> website; that is really important)
Why would that be important? Especially if you propose bold text for
links as well, but also in general, having too many bold words just
disturb while reading IMO. Do you think a reader is not able to
retrieve a message of two sentences without this?
You have a good point (too much is emphasied). I did this because
there was not enough separation between the intro and the other text.
Better solution: I quickly modified the front page according to
Petter's suggestion. I still emphasized that Haiku is an operating
system, so you know immediately what it's about.
Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald
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