Date: Wed, 25 Jun 97 14:02:05 +0200 From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Cc: webmaster@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Technobabble homepage (Was: Ick!) Message-ID: <9706251202.AA08152@wavehh.hanse.de> In-Reply-To: <199706221911.PAA13102@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> References: <199706221911.PAA13102@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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Garrett Wollman writes: > It used to be possible to actually find something useful at > www.freebsd.org. Now all I get is this marketroid nonsense. It's not > at all obvious how to get to some basic resource like cvsweb.... I think the positive feedback and opinions like Garrett's show a fundamental difference in what people expect from a Web site. There are two approaches: - Using the homepage text for "market" information, using highlighted text as eye-catchers and the normal text within to explain the eye-catches somehwat and link to more information about the topic. And moving "hard" information to a toolbar of some sort. This is what Megan's Design is about and it is what most market-oriented companies do (just saw Javasoft has exactly the same approach, all useful information behind a pixmap toolbar). Let me call this a "market-oriented" approach, no pun intended. - Using the text of the home page so that a huge number of "hard" resources (= needed for experienced people, but somewhat "technobally" for new people) is directly accessable, using highlighted text to lead faster to the right link. The old homepage and Stefan's proposal (http://www.promo.de/people/stefan/freebsd/home1/) are of that sort. Let me call the a "technobabble" approach, no pun intended. I think FreeBSD is in a position where it in fact is market-oriented and profits from Megan's design. The huge number of positive feedback mails show that it is a success and reaches people who are at least willing to stay around as long as it takes to send a mail. It is obviously not the case that this design attracks only random surfers. I'd like to propose that we create an alternate homepage in addition. The new page should look like and could be treated like a sitemap and meet these requirements: - Strongly using text to lead to specific resources. No text wasted for marketing, for things people need to be told only once. - Listing a huge number of interesting items on this pages. Let the page grow as it needs, it should be no criteria that it fits without scrolling. Even links into the handbook could be useful, using the Web server logfile to tell what is most interesting. - It should show that we do it all for fun, that speaking technobabble can be fun, that many developer's primary goal is to make things works, just for watching it doing some work. It it's part of the official homepage, we could detract people not used to fun. But I think it is also very important that FreeBSD doesn't look like it derived from hackerdom too much, so we could create the "Hacker's Homepage". If we get a huge link "map of technical resources" and "Hacker's Homepage" (both pointing to the same thing :-), I think this approach could make a lot of people happy. If you agree, I will approach Stefan and we'll (or I) will come up with a first version. As a side note, I am not sure things were treated right when Stefan and Megan proposed new homepages. As I recall, both asked for comments, but megan went on and committed, while Stefan still waited. We have to make sure the Web site will not be changed on a fastest-commiter basis :-) I don't know any behind-the-scenes arrangements, so excuse me if this comment isn't in line. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de> http://cracauer.cons.org Fax +49 40 522 85 36
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