separate fpo domain? (was Re: making the website better)

[Máirín Duffy]

Jeffrey Tadlock wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2008 1:32 PM, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> For some historical background, the fpo site was such a link farm (or
>> landing page, either one is bad I think) with six links on it. It didn't
>> work well and the domain was eventually changed to point directly to the
>> wiki. See:
>>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20050419015224/http://www.fedoraproject.org/
>>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20050826014104/http://fedoraproject.org/
> 
> Yep, those are ugly.  That's not what I suggested, but I may not be
> communicating my point very well.

Oh I didn't mean to say you were, sorry about that. I meant to show them 
as an example of what I think people are thinking when you're talking 
about a central point of contact. That is what I initially thought of 
anyway until I digged into the ubuntu example you showed.
> 
> There is nothing that says our main page has to be plain text links.
> We can link to other sections of the project though from the main page
> and make it look good.  We can cover the what is Fedora on the main
> page.  We can use pleasant graphics somewhere about the page to get
> you deeper in to the subject matter you seek.

+1 But, the choice here is which things are deeper to get to, which 
things are more shallow to get to? You can't have everything shallow, or 
you will definitely have a 'link farm.' (The examples from archive.org 
are the opposite, everything deep)
> 
>> We're not suggesting having a separate domain for every single
>> subsection of the site. I would suggest we have two, very similar to the
>> Firefox website's model:
>>
>> - getfedora.org (or usefedora.org, or whatever)
>>
>> - fedoraproject.org -
>>
>> A third site I think we could have is what J5 is working on - my fedora
>> - along the veins of fedoraproject.org,
> 
> I only disagree in splitting these off into different domain names.
> Dedicated sections for the user community, developers and the
> myfedora.fp.o all make sense.  It makes sure the information for each
> group of people is relatively contained in one area.  Those sections
> could be getfedora.fp.o or dev.fp.o or whatever - but it helps show
> some form of hierarchy.  This is just my opinion of course.
Sure, and the opinion of a few others is that the 'project' in the 
fedoraproject.org domain makes it sound more community/developer 
oriented and that users and newbies might prefer something more friendly 
sounding,

It would be nice if we could have fedora.org and organize everything 
from there but we can't.
> 
>> ubuntu has:
>>
>> ubuntuforums.org
>> fridge.ubuntu.com
>> shop.canonical.com
>> wiki.ubuntu.com
>> a separate domain for almost every 'spin' - kubuntu.org, edubuntu.org, etc.
> 
> I liked the overall way the Ubuntu page got you to different places
> and that is what I was trying to show.  I have absolutely zero
> artistic talent, so I couldn't sketch or make a mockup and had to rely
> on a page I think does its job reasonably well.  :)
> 
> I don't see a problem with sub-domains as it still helps show we all
> fall under one branch.  So translating the above URLs into an Fedora
> hierarchy it would be:
> 
> forums.fp.o
> news.fp.o
> store.fp.o
> wiki.fp.o
> spins.fp.o
> 
> That to me shows some organization behind the group.  I am sure others
> will disagree, everyone does have a different way of looking at
> things.

I definitely think it's far more useful to draw up mockups and plans and 
build discussion around them instead of arguing about ideas that we 
might not even be interpreting the same way. ;-) I think we agree on a 
lot of levels, hopefully I'll have some time to mock some of this up to 
show concretely what I am thinking and we can critque those for a more 
effective discussion.
> 
>> What ubuntu is doing is that ubuntu.com is geared towards users and
>> non-contributors (and customers) and it links out towards developer and
>> contributor resources. I am a developer i have to dig pretty deep on
>> their site to get to stuff that interests me.
> 
> So, we fix that.  Fedora is tends to be a developer distro, we make
> sure that first click off the main page takes you deep into the heart
> of developer land and minimize the number of clicks - because that is
> important to us.  Even better we call that first link dev.fp.o - so
> now the developer either remembers that or bookmarks straight into the
> section they really care about.

+1

> Meanwhile, for the users we keep a little more user centric content on
> the main page.  Because unlike the developers they are probably
> landing on our page in search of the questions you want to answer for
> them.

Exactly.
> 
>> I think you are slightly exaggerating what we are suggesting here.
> 
> No more so than calling my ideas nothing more than a link farm.

I never said your ideas were nothing more than a link farm. I think the 
point was that a link farm is something we want to avoid and a possible 
interpretation of what you were suggesting but from your further 
explanation and examples it's clear thats not what you meant.
> 
> I think your ideas are great for developing more specific sections of
> the site.  A user specific area with the scary developer content not
> in it would be useful for new users to Fedora or users trying to
> choose a distro.  And vice versa, getting developers into an area that
> is more suited for them and not 'learning about Fedora'.  I only
> disagree on adding yet more domain names to the mix to accomplish
> that.

We are suggesting adding ONE more domain name. No more than that. It was 
never ever suggested that we would have a seperate domain name for each 
site section as I pointed out before.

~m