Simple website

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

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.

-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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