Noah Slater wrote:
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Miles Fidelman
<[email protected]>wrote:
With all due respect and appreciation for your efforts.... marketing is
one thing, utility is another. While there's value to marketing, (IMHO)
utility counts more. We're not talking about a magazine ad, we're talking
about a web site that people have taken some effort to find and go to -
they're (we're) looking for information - if the information isn't there,
it doesn't matter how pretty the site is.
I've been building websites for clients for the best part of a decade, so I
assure you that I understand your points here. ;) When I said "a marketing
site" I meant that it's primary purpose is to market CouchDB to new users.
Not that we should think of it as a print ad. Trust me, I have worked with
people who do think about websites like this, and I know how crazy that
attitude is.
Not to get into a contest here, but I've been building web sites since
about 1995 (and gopher sites
before that). And doing sales and business development since 1974.
Web sites are, by and large, NOT like print ads - they generally are not
the first point of contact that someone has with a "product." Rather
they are "collateral" - akin to brochures, spec. sheets, case studies,
and the like. Someone is likely to go to the CouchDB web site AFTER
hearing/reading about CouchDB somewhere else, and goes to
couchdb.apache.org (or more likely couchdb.org) looking for details -
specs, white papers, slide shows, a list of who's using CouchDB, a live
demo, and signs that the project is alive, widely used, and supported by
a strong community of maintainers and developers, (and perhaps a
commercial ecosystem that can provide hosting, development, and other
forms of support).
By and large, at least when I'm evaluating software for use on a project
or internally, I'm looking for two things:
- a quick understanding of the software (who, what, where, why, how,
etc.) - PPTs, screen shots, demos, white papers
- a strong community
By and large a user and developer oriented site, with a highly visible
"learn more" link is far more effective as a marketing vehicle than
something that looks like a print ad.
Agreed, I think we could add a new section. This is already on the wiki.
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Website_Design
I am starting to wonder if anyone is even checking this page! ;)
No body has added anything to it since I created it, and yet this thread
rages on. ;)
Ummm... it's pretty hard to find. I had to go back through the email
thread to find it, and the archives are not even searchable.
For experienced users, updates, detailed documentation, code libraries
(when users are developing stuff), support for odd problems, ...
This belongs on the wiki for now.
The website is a single serving website.
That is intentional, and I'd like to keep it that way.
The wiki should be our primary focus for detailed information.
The quickest way to turn off potential users is to make information hard
to find. There's no link to the Wiki on the front page.
The MongoDB website is easier to navigate? Heh. Ours is one page. By
definition, there is no navigation, just scrolling. ;) Perhaps you mean
that the sign posts to other resources are clearer. Again, all we've done
is move our sign posts to the bottom of the page. We are, clearly,
optimising for a specific use case here. Joe Random clicking on a link, and
asking "WTF IS COUCHDB?" We answer that quite well, I think. Or at least,
better than we used to. And there is certainly room for improvement. We
could cram all of our project signposts in to the header, but we would be
sacrificing the simplicity of the site, and the key focus on "WTF IS
COUCHDB?" and "WHERE DO I DOWNLOAD?"
Absolutely. Pretty much everything anybody might look for is right
there - including WTF is MongoDB and Download.
One thing that disturbed me, was a comment that there's no link to the
markmail archive because it's not "official." That seems like a rather
unproductive approach to building and supporting a user community - links
to other resources should be encouraged, not discouraged - both as a way to
make the main site useful, and as a sign that the community is "alive."
You have misinterpreted me. "Unofficial" resources are great! But with a
single serving site you have to make some trade-offs in the name of
simplicity. We have, in the design, a single link to the web interfaces for
the mailing lists. So we have, naturally, chosen to link to the official
ASF web interface. The Markmail links deserve a mention, but not here.
There are other places we can promote them.
Well, if it were me, I'd have a single link to a mailing list page like
http://www.erlang.org/static/doc/mailinglist.html - not clutter up the
front page with all the details.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
