(I hope people will excuse me for posting this here as well as the wiki, but it seems there is little if any discussion taking place there )
As the old saying goes "You can take a Horse to water but you can't make him drink" And therein it seems, lies much of our problem. There is I believe a confusion of goals at the homepage. We are getting people to the download page but that is not the end goal. You have to give the horse a reason to drink, Either, make him thirsty, make the water desirable beyond his need for water or wait till he is thirsty before you take him there. The three tenets of Marketing *Create a need *Create a desire *Fill a present need Right now we do none of these well, we simply shove the Horse at the trough, only to make it doubly difficult, we blindfold him, block up his nose and force him to sup it through a straw after he has learned that drinking some types of water.will be bad for him. People come to a website for two main reasons *Curiosity *To solve a problem They will leave for more reasons: *Their curiosity has been satisfied and they leave informed *They find a solution to their problem *They can't satisfy that curiosity within a reasonable time and they leave frustrated *They can't find the solution or it is not obvious and they leave frustrated *Fear of the unknown Our problem is right now, and the discussions up to this point are reinforcing this point, we are not asking the User what he wants to do we are telling them what we expect them to do, We inform them where to download, but we don't give them information that will make them feel comfortable about hitting the download button, or to stretch our metaphor a bit further, we talk to our horse about the trough but not about how good the water is, while the horse is still worried about drowning.. So I've put together a draft of a front page continuing on the simplicity idea which I'm a fan of. The difference is that we provide "Answers to the Question" "You have arrived at OpenOffice.org what would you like to do now?" http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg Native Language would be another answer if we don't get a users language from their browser. I like oooauthors.org method of doing this, but I'm not sure of the practicality of a page with 80 odd language choices. I like the Quintura "Mindmapping" method (www.quintura.com : type in a search item you'll see what I mean) of giving choices perhaps we could figure a way to narrow the choices by location. Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, INGOTs Assessor Trainer Moderator New Zealand (International Grades in Office Technologies) www.theingots.org Phone DDI +64 7 886 8171 Mobile +64 27 494 4315 OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
