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Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:04:57 +1200
From: Graham Lauder <g.a.lauder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Website Content plus Look and Feel Improvements
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On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 10:23 -0700, Dave Fisher wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2011, at 9:29 PM, Graham Lauder wrote:


> > 
> > Much of what is on there is legacy material that could be seriously
> > pruned.  For instance all the old Marketing material that is V2.0 and
> > earlier could be deleted.
> 
> What would you do to the main openoffice.org site if you were starting from scratch?

Big question, moving to Apache has one big advantage from my POV.  
(I should point out that my POV is marketing centric and is End User
focussed rather than developer focussed.)

With the content going onto CMS it makes it a lot easier for marketing
content to be updated and changed as required. The Collabnet setup was
difficult.

The OOo web presence is huge, not just the website itself but all the
NLC projects, the services part, maillists, forums, downloads and so on.
Each fragment is looked after by it's own team.  There are overlaps (ie:
Distribution and CDROM) and global projects (Renaissance, art, UX)  each
piece has it's user base and it's client base and so the website as an
entirety, obviously has to reflect that.

The home page as it is now was designed originally with one overriding
goal: "increase downloads."

Therefore we had to analyse our catchment, identify our user groups and
their specific needs and patterns of usage of the Website. We then
needed to specifically identify the Home page users and their needs.  It
should be noted that while there is a crossover, Homepage users are a
different set to Website users.  Regular community members tend to
bypass the homepage because they know where they can fulfil their needs
already, they either go straight to the wiki or the forums or docs or
whichever part is specific to their part of the community.  

IMS We identified 5 groups that visit the Homepage.

Casual arrivals
People seeking a download, either for the first time or to upgrade
Users seeking assistance
People wishing to contribute to the community
Developers

Each of these groups have entirely different needs.  The original home
page tried to cater for all these different groups and ended up doing it
badly.  My intention for the homepage was to have each of these groups
headed to wherever they needed to be on the website within 15 seconds.
We did that by reducing the number of decisions and introducing the
"Action Statements". (There were over 120 links on the original homepage
we reduced them to about 15, not including those in the news column.)

Did it achieve More Downloads? as far as I know, yes. Louis would be
better informed on this. A lot of debate went on with regard to the
concept of the "Action Statements", over many months, but once the web
team were onside the results were, to my eyes, spectacular.  

(Just for amusements sake
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg was my first rather amateurish mockup which the website team, Maarten, Kay, Ivan and others turned into http://www.openoffice.org .) 

So the homepage is simply a portal, a signpost that is geared to cater
to the Unsophisticated End User.  These people require simplicity,
continuity and a feeling of security and it is only this group that the
warmth and comfort of http://www.openoffice.org would be significant or
necessary.

So, keep the home page as is or find someway to get the CMS to display
it, action statements intact at least.

Then to my mind the only subs to the OOo domain that I would think that
would be compulsory would be:
support.openoffice.org        
Why.openoffice.org and
download.openoffice.org

and the NLC subdomains

The rest of the website could happily exist under OpenOffice.apache.org.

Cheers
for now

GL


> 
> Regards,
> Dave
> 
> 
> > 
> > Argument could be made for the marketing material to start from scratch.
> > Personally I'd like to see a whole new branding and get shot of the old
> > stuff, make the first Apache release: V4.0 (Historically, significant
> > global change has meant a whole number change in the version: V2 new
> > codebase, V3 Apple compatibility. I think this is significant enough:
> > pre V4 = LGPL license, V4 and later = ALV2)  From a marketing POV it
> > gives us a handle to hang a campaign on.  
> > 
> > Cheers
> > GL
> > 
> > -- 
> > Graham Lauder,
> > OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
> > http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
> > 
> > OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
> > 
> > 
> > 
>