On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Eli Billauer wrote: > Alon Altman wrote: > > > This is a temporary measure to help promote the W2L series. > > > This is the classic paradigm held by Microsoft: The user has no idea > what he or she wants, let's push our suggestions. That's why you never > know what happens next when you run Windows. > > Why are we imitating? > > Let's think who comes to our sites: Ourselves, those looking for > concrete info (lectures and such) and those who just heard about Haifux. > > The two first groups will be mildly annoyed. The third group will get > the impression that all Haifux does is W2L.
You're ignoring a fourth important group. This group includes people who saw the paper ads to the W2L series and followed the link to www.haifux.org, or heard a friend mention Haifux to them. Some of these people are not very fluent with English and might think they have the wrong address if they see the regular Haifux page. Most new visitors to Haifux come via a search engine to an internal page, and are not affected by the redirect. I agree the we should not redirect people who visited Haifux via a link (from a search engine or otherwise), but just those who typed the URL in (I can add this simple fix). > I think that a link in large font, possibly in red, near the top of the > original page is enough to make it clear for any curious surfer that > there is going to be a set of lectures. Don't worry, some of our > potential visitors have the motoric ability to click a link, not to talk > about the wisdom of choice. This link exists in any case. There is also a small English link at the top of the newcomers site for people redirected by mistake. > Alon, what do you think when you type a URL and get something else than > you expected? This is exactly why we *do* have the redirect. Some people will type "www.haifux.org" that they saw in the ads and find a different site than expected. The detection based on country and referrer will drastically reduce the false positives. Alon -- This message was sent by Alon Altman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ICQ:1366540 GPG public key at http://alon.wox.org/pubkey.txt Key fingerprint = A670 6C81 19D3 3773 3627 DE14 B44A 50A3 FE06 7F24 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -=[ Random Fortune ]=- Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. -- Martin Mull -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://www.haifux.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
