I'm glad that people are interested and passionate about the hp.o site. My current major concern: If we do not state what we are trying to accomplish with the site, then we have no means to evaluate the success of any changes.
Alex gets off to a decent start here: > 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 But I think that this only really applies to one type of user who would visit the site. There are actually FOUR types of users who visit our site. (I documented this long ago at http://wiki.habariproject.org/en/Designs/Habari_Home) I certainly don't need to know that our software and community is amazing. I'd nevertheless appreciate direct links to the API docs, the wiki, or support channels. We might say, "yes, of course," to these issues, but we do need to remember that our biggest contributor to the goal of bringing in new users right now is word of mouth. Satisfying the needs of users who are willing to try and stick with Habari is just as important as bringing in new people. The above are also hard goals to measure. Is there a click-through that serves as verification that a user agrees our software is amazing, or that the community is welcoming? Hard to say. "We're awesome! Click here if you agree!" Some more down-to-earth goals could be quantifiable, like, "Turn X% of visitors into registered users." Or, "Have X% of visitors continue from the home page to at least one more page." In analytics terms, these are called, "conversions." We should assemble a nice list of these and discover a way to measure them. We need also to keep in mind that our home page (as distasteful as it may seem) must include some SEO. If a goal of the site is to attract new users, and they never find our site when searching, we've already failed. One of the primary reasons to have the blog on the home page is to keep fresh content available for search engines. We're currently doing a poor job of keeping that content fresh and engaging -- oh, well. There are some claims being made by folks about what users want to see. I made this Crazyegg heatmap a while back, showing where people actually click on our site: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3178/2817018229_663dc042c1_o.png This one for the wiki is not quite as useful (because Crazyegg's page rendering throws off the columns on the wiki), but does indicate our dire need for themes (not just a directory to hold them, but an actual quantity of themes): http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3269/2814569817_ddc9a208d5_o.png I'd suggest looking at actual analytics to see how people are using the site, but someone insists on loading Woopra onto the site instead of something useful, and I'm not sure how to access the Woopra stats. To be clear, I don't want to access the Woopra stats -- I want real, public analytics. We should choose a single, web-based analytics provider, and open up access to review the statistics there. Sadly, none of our historical stats are going to be in there. In any case, I'm sure that we can do the site better, but it would be folly to take the knowledge that is available and research that has been done and discard it in the name of a cool idea. Whether it's true, it seems to me like people are coming at the "hp.o sucks" problem with no review of the past work, perhaps simply because they don't like the site's current design. Nonetheless, I like the idea of portals for the separate user types, because it caters to the idea that there is more than one type of visitor to the site. I'm not sure that those should be automatically presented based on user preference, but a "developer center" that appears after you log in would be useful. On the other hand, I oppose the idea of draggable, personalized, configurable interface elements. Habari is not Netvibes, and I don't see that we have that much information to drag around anyway. Please also keep in mind that this site will require maintenance. Specifying cool features is fun, but someone has to implement them. If they're built poorly, or they fail for some reason in the future, someone will need to fix them. I submit that neglect is the reason the site is as poor as it is. Making the site more complex will only exacerbate that issue. Developing features that do not target our goals would be even worse. And finally: Tag Clouds-- Owen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
