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Hi everyone :)I've been trying to catch up with the main/projects page thread. I have some suggestions.
Firstly, a style point. Is there any reason why we're not using drop- down menu items in the horizontal navbar? That would save space and give us some quick links.
Secondly, the current content hasn't caught up with the action-based focus of the homepage, and of many NLP pages:
Get it Install it Use itVerbs engage the user. So I suggest, for example, that we change Contributing to "My choice" or "Participate" and have drop-down menu items as follows:
Coding Working on docs. Testing and QA Translation Promoting OpenOffice GraphicsThese links would take the user to pages with much more detail, but they are quick descriptions of what they would do. It's active language, and gives them the info right from the navbar. Choosing "My choice > Translation" should always take me to l10n.openoffice.org, which would save me a bookmark, among other things. ;)
Forget calling it "programming" or "writing": to the people who do it, it's "coding" or "hacking" and "working on docs" or "doc work", etc. "Internationalization" and "Native-Language Projects" might be a much better explanation of what we really do, but nearly all the time we just talk about "Translation". And "Marketing" puts off people from the free-software world. "Promoting" is what we do. "Graphics" is what the computer artists call it. I have at least one Photoshop addict in my house, so I know. ;)
The drop-down items from the navbar would mean faster navigation in general.
I think "My pages" is under-utilized. Mine has one user-specific item on it, the Vietnamese project, and I know where that is. We could do more with this.
I agree that a page showing functions and where they fit in OOo would be a useful resource. Even experienced users often use less than 5% of the capability of their software. Show them what OOo can do.
From that page, each item could link to a page with info on how to help. Current issues. Current efforts. Some tips on how to improve your usage. A link to the latest emails on this subject. Something alive and useful. A window on OpenOffice from the POV of that function. It would be a useful training method, too: move from one function to another through the table and see how much you learn from those pages. We need a better name than "function", though, something more dynamic and less easily confused with mathematical actions. "features"? "abilities"? "choices"?
I suggest changing the Projects tab to "Inside OpenOffice" (?) or something similar. To anyone from other projects, a project is the single entity, the whole effort. "Projects" implies you're looking at something outside the current project, not inside. OOo is big enough to have sub-projects, OK, but that's not the usual structure. We're referring to the structure of OOo, which is unusual, so we need to use words that are more familiar to most people.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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