Simple website

[Juan Camilo Prada]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 15:50 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 15:47 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >  
> > Eh, it looks like the laptop.org home page which has always felt lacking 
> > to me.  Not to say that we don't have too much on our front page, just 
> > that too little can be just as bad.  An interface that's too cluttered 
> > is hard to navigate but an interface that has too little doesn't give 
> > you enough clues on how to navigate and worse, no reason to want to 
> > navigate it.
> 
> This is the position that I take.  We must not be slavish in our worship
> of simplicity to the point of dropping important aspects of the _Fedora_
> main website.
> 
> My thinking is to look for different ways to present simplicity with
> complexity.
> 
> * Make use of AJAX and hide/show stuff easily
>   - by preference, i.e., remember what someone set (cookie)
>   - by dynamic effect, such as mouseover
> 
> * Remember across sessions what people prefer, so you can minimize
> clutter
> 
> * Give people the option to make stuff invisible?  That is, "Never show
> me the news feed or link to join, I only ever want to see downloads and
> the latest package information feed/security alerts."
> 
> * Elegant failure just ends up with a more cluttered page but all
> information is available
> 
> * Define what the _Fedora_ main page must convey
>   - people don't like being lead down a long tunnel (the funneling
> concept) if they can find what they want on the front page
>     - for a search portal (google is, fedora ain't), one can be as
> minimal as google.com is
>     - we obviously need to raise to the surface more exposure points
> than google
> 
> * Make simpled, elegant, and cool tools that let us convey that
> information for people in a useful way
> 
> * Make it a bit hard to turn off the dynamic parts of the page.  People
> need to see regularly the vibrancy of our community, on every page
> visit.
>   - It doesn't have to be RSS feeds, but it cold
>   - It could be a visual representation of how far along translation on
> the latest release is going
>   - It could show a package count + packagers + users cool graph heat
> map thingie
> 
> * Be willing to try ideas and watch the metrics
>   - If people click on something, talk about it, post the URL often in
> #fedora, embrace it for longer
>   - If people ignore and hate it, remove it
> 
> ... stuff like that.
> 

I couldnt agree more!!

what i tried to say last time was that this kind of ideas are not being
seriously taken as we keep discussing if fp.o need changes or not and if
those changes should be huge or small. 

i can remember how i did some changes to the layout a few months ago,
and lots of people say "hey this is great..." but then nobody took it
seriously. So as long as we dont take any actions we will be stuck at
this point of discussion.

quaid has this great starting points, lets take them into a count, lets
stop discussing things that are not going anywhere and lets make a
meeting in which we can settle this and start working on it.

If i had the experience and knowledge i would lead it myself, but im not
sure how to do it. If there is someone who can help me with it then
please contact me and lets work together on that meeting.

The sooner the better

-- 
Juan Camilo Prada <jprada at fedoraproject.org>