Stuart Ballard wrote:
>the overall presentation of the site (last time I looked) suggests the same thing:
>we'd like you to be our customer, as opposed to we'd like you to be
>*part* of us.
>
Yes, that's intended. I recognize that normal end-users can and want to
do almost nothing for us (=Beonex or Mozilla). They are not programmers,
they have no time to devote, they just want a good browser. Beonex
competes with Microsoft and Netscape. How many users even wonder how
they could help Netscape or would do so, if asked?
The only thing that I do want from users is:
* If they are some of those few who are willing and capable of
helping, point them to beonex.org and mozilla.org
* For all others, donate some money to further fund development and
servers.
* Spread the word
Basically, the main site should say: "Here, we have a cake for you, take
it, and if you're nice, leave some money."
>I think there's room for both beonex.com and beonex.org. Present
>beonex.org as the homepage when making release announcements, calls for
>volunteers, etc on mozilla newsgroups and the like. People on those
>groups are more likely to be developers than end-users. Mention both
>pages if you announce on freshmeat, because both classes of people might
>frequent that. If you talk to any mainstream press, mention the .com
>site. Structure beonex.org something like Mozilla.org, with the main
>links being to download (source and binary) tarballs, mailing lists, cvs
>access, etc. Maybe mirror the patchmaker homepage - see if you can make
>it even easier to use patchmaker with beonex than with mozilla[1]. Of
>course, have a prominent link to beonex.com near the top of beonex.org
>to indicate where users should go. Then remove the developer information
>from beonex.com and put just the user's documentation, mailing lists,
>binary-only tarballs and packages, screenshots, etc on beonex.com.
>
That's basically what I'm doing today. beonex.org is for development,
beonex.com the main site used for the press.
Just that I want to have one main site only, where Beonex Communicator
is described etc. (everything else would be redundant and probably
confusing).
Note that some users have said that they find a split between .com and
.org confusing.
(I haven't ever looked at PatchMaker, and probably won't have time to do
so.)
>It took me a long time to find the beonex
>developer mailing lists in the site (and now I've lost them and can't
>find them again, even with the help of the sitemap), and I still haven't
>found the archives.
>
Will check that.
>a mail-archive link for the developer lists prominently from the
>proposed beonex.org page would give me a much more positive impression
>about the "community-orientedness" of beonex.
>
I see that the websites could need some improvement in their
organization. Not sure, how exactly, though. I'm reluctant to add tons
of links to the homepage.
>[1] One way to do this would be to offer patchmaker-ready binary
>tarballs. These would come with the chrome directory pre-unjarred (with
>the jar files removed entirely) and patchmaker sitting in the same place
>as the beonex binary, all ready to go.
>
Yes, Simon P. Lucy expressed interest in non-jar builds, too.
Ben Bucksch
