Re: [website-dev] direct links to 'project' pages on main page

[Clytie Siddall]

On 05/01/2003, at 12:32 AM, Graham wrote:

It would seem to me that to create webpages targeted at developers we would

need to be able identify what it is that would make working on OOo

be so hard to get for the flyer


have here is the need for simple marketing procedures

Identify your market
Identify their needs/desires
Identify how we can fill those needs/desires
and tell them.

attractive to them.... in other words that same type of thing that seems to I know that marketing is probably a dirty word amongst developers but what we

I have two coders in the family.

They want a challenge
They want to feel comfortable in the environment
They like to be appreciated and valued, but will never ask for it
They need Input (a good information network).
They enjoy tilting at windmills.

So...
___

Why use OpenOffice?
Because it's good at the job?
Because it's a non-commercial alternative?
Because it's biodegradable?




___

As the man said, to catch a fish, you have to think like a fish. ;)





John said:

People will switch to OpenOffice to use _your_ code. Come and tilt at the biggest windmill out there. Write the next generation of office software. Show the mass market what free code can do. We'll try and keep the caffeine coming. Oh, and the Coders' Lounge has links to the best gaming sites. ;) These people will work till steam comes out their ears. Just give them the praise and appreciation they deserve, and keep the consumables coming: caffeine, games and technical info. "No marketing crap." (I quote.) Coders _hate_ politics and complex hierarchies. Keep it simple and let them get on with the job. They respect things that work. Show them a project that works.

"OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. Our software technology is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to exploit. To

help build the community, join us."

Mathias said:

Hmm, I'm not so sure about the third sentence. "Our software includes OpenOffice coding tools for further development, enhancement or integration in systems. Show us what you can do." ? "exploit" sounds more like an invitation to break the code by midnight. The last thing you want is script kiddies.

Another point I would like to rise: could we have a more prominent link to the "contribute" page, perhaps equally in visibility and size to the

"get OOo" or the "Native Language" button?

I suggest "Participate". Ah, someone has already done so. +1. :)





Christian said:

I would suggest "Get involved", but it's a good idea to stay away from idiom, if you want to attract more people. "Participate" has some healthy European roots which will make sense to people speaking a variety of languages. It's also a single word that can be looked up in a dictionary. Try looking up "Get involved" or "Have a go" in a dictionary. BTW, for the NLP link on the front page, I suggest "OpenOffice in my language". Users don't necessarily recognize the term "Native language". It's not a term widely-used in userland.

And I can claim that the front-page is end-users directed since that was

the outcome of the discussions held when redesigning the page a while
back.


times I don't care about those.

If people did not took part in the discussion although invited numerous

What I'm trying to say with this example is that:





Graham said:

People come and go all the time, giving us new ideas. Not everyone here would necessarily have been a functioning member of this project, or of OOo, when you had that discussion. I wasn't. Officially, I joined OOo over two years ago, when I put my name down for our Vietnamese NLP. I didn't realize at the time that it was dead. I signed up for the mailing lists, wrote to the contact addresses, and nothing ever happened. So I got involved with other projects. This year (August) I was asked to help resuscitate our project (OOo 2.1 will be our first supported release :D ). Up till the translation submission date (26 Oct.) I was head-down, working on the translation. I've only had a chance to find out more about the overall project since then, in between building our project, QA etc. 1. It's useful to discuss things on a regular schedule of some kind, e.g. review the homepage every 6 months, to fit with the new release schedule, since things change and you do get new people all the time; 2. people may be members of OOo, but not necessarily receive your information. We need to find a way to improve the information flow to projects, where people can be so fully occupied that they don't have time to look anywhere else. I only found this list, in the end, because I needed help with updating our website. I didn't know what you did, or that you wanted project members to participate.

One of the Art/Marketing project members did a lot of work on a front page for

the Why.openoffice.org marketing campaign and this was after a lot of

because Andre went fruit picking.  :)


the new role, could suit the task.


http://wyrfel.reukauf.com/hosting/OOo/Why_1/en/index.html

discussion. I'm not quite sure why it wasn't used in the end, probably However it is an excellent piece of work and with some modification to suit

Oh, this is GOOD. Definitely getting the job done. :)





Christian said:

And the page is translatable! We really need that. Think how much sense the current OOo homepage would make to you in a language you can't read. We should use the browser prefs of the user to present them with a homepage in their own language: the NLP page, perhaps, but I think this "Why OpenOffice" page is much better than any homepages we have done in NLP. And the page has drop-down menus. Very good design overall. Surely we can use this!

The whole thing with end-users is that these are always different
people, not always the same ones...
If you're registered user, you have My pages that lists your projects
and probably have a set of bookmarks already.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

I'm both a registered user of OOo, and a member of our NLP project. I participate in this project, the QA project and the Mac-porting project. "My pages" just shows the link to our Vietnamese NLP project. No bookmarks. Nothing specific to me. I really think this is under-developed, and thus probably under-utilized I agree with Frank's comments about the wiki. We could make much more use of the wiki in linking to it from the website. For example, wiki- based pages are much less susceptible to becoming out-of-date when people aren't accessible or simply stop contributing. They are also much more flexible in keeping up with change. Well, I seem to have caught up with this thread, in its various incarnations. I hope we can be flexible enough to grab the good ideas while they're available. from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)

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