feed'd front page ready

[Juan Camilo Prada]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 21:44 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > > I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that
> > > but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page.  I
> > > missed this one or I would have fought it too.  I say again:
> > >
> > > There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/
> > > isn't.  If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it
> > > has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
> >
> > Im not an authority here but one thing that ive discussed a lot with some other people is
> > the lack of information fp.o currently has. I understand the point of not filling every
> > possible white space in the site with information, but Im sure many people here agree that
> > there are a lot of white spaces that are not being used that, if we use them carefully and esthetically
> > we can manage to get a great website with enough information and not too overwhelming for the eye
> 
> Lack of information?  Whats missing?  Be extremely specific.  Also let me
> know that of the information you find missing, how it will be fulfilled by
> linking to planet, devfu and FWM?  Remember, we're not adding content.
> Just more things to click on.
> 
You are right about the planet and maybe about devfu, what i do not
agree is about fwn. I think that the idea of having a website for the
project is to let people knoe about the project and not just about the
released distro. News are important to the community and having news in
the front page is always a good idea. I dont know anybody who likes to
read news that also likes to start digging here and there just to find
whats new. As in a newspaper the first page is what will catch people
attention, and having a very simplistic style with no news and just
saying the general idea of the fedora project is not that appealing. 

As of what you said about google's success having a clean interface, 
its kinda irrelevant here (no offense) but, google is a completly different 
application. it is meant to be a browser and just that so it focus its attention 
on being a browser. Of course they have lot more applications and each one has 
its own interface but the thing is that... google is an aplication not an informative website
which should focus on a completly different goal.

our primary purpose with the website (at least thats what i think) is to catch people attention
and that can only be achieved by showing information. Perhaps this is not a discussion to be made on this topic
but as an example, i cant see good information about how to get involved, we simply specify a link to the wiki
and thats all, so we are leaving that kind of information to another application (the wiki) which i think
its making useless the fp.o website. 

Another example is the download section, yes we say "these are all the ways you can install fedora" but then
we dont say which is better for the user (i385, x86_64, etc...) 

Having information in the front page makes it easier to let people know what they want 
without making them digg into the website, and in the website world i think thats a plus in terms of
usability. 

Im not a marketing expert so i dont really know what would be better to set on the front page to get people
atention, probably somebody better than me and more informed about the project could share his ideas about
what catch people attention. As for me, i think news and Events are one of the more important things to show 
in the front page.

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