Thanks for everybody's input so far, I'm a strong believer in getting heaps of feedback and opinions and refining them later on, so keep it coming! Although homepage content is an important part of the overall website, it is just a part and I want to reaffirm that the 'Website Overhaul' effort isn't just about the homepage. However, it's kicking up quite a storm so I'll put in my two cents!
I think the hompage needs to do two main things: - Show that our software is amazing - Show that we have an active and welcoming community of users and developers And that's all people want to see when they visit for the first time. We need to convince them to download Habari before we slam a download link in their face! :P How do we show it's amazing? Screenshots, videos and well organized featurelists - perhaps split developer specific features from the rest, and list summaries of our features and be able to click on the summary sentence and have more details expand below it? How do we show off our community? Have an activity stream for the whole site, aggregate recent activity from the forums, trac, mailing lists, and blog. There is an incredible amount of things going on every day, and you just don't get that feeling of a vibrant community from visiting the site, it's very 'static'. I also feel we need to make the official blog less of a release announcement blog, but a place to get weekly roundups on decisions made, and changes in trunk, in ways people can get involved, we may want to post a survey to see what features get into the next few releases etc etc. Repeat visitors are a different story, but we can accommodate them too... It's almost a given that the new site will have user accounts, so when a repeat user logs in they will be shown a *different homepage* to a first time visitor. All users could have a personalised homepage which they customize (?), tick boxes to choose what widgets appear on there and drag and drop them around? So I could choose to have the feed for the -dev list on there, a latest/popular plugins widget, an API QuickSearch widget for when I need to find an Habari function quickly, and a tonne of other widgets *I choose.* My experience of the Habari site is now far more personal, and tailored to my needs. Developers will be able to visit the 'Developer Center' homepage which will be more relevent to them and offer them quick access to the developer wiki, blog posts tagged 'developers' will be shown, latest activity in the -dev mailing lists, trac activity and SVN commits etc etc. Regular users will be able to visit the 'Community Portal' homepage, a place dedicated to making community participation easier. We will have feedback polls, surveys, latest extensions, forum activity, we can embed an IRC client to make it easier for people unfamiliar with it. The Developer Center and Community Portal will be available to new users, and linked to from the homepage, but it gets a whole lot better when you log in... I've talked too much, and probably talked some rubbish, but these are my random-ish ideas - feedback and refinement is needed!! :) -- Alex (Hempsworth) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-users -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
