On Wednesday 15 April 2009 09:38:28 am Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:

Hi all,

Check out the comment from Lars on this post: http://zonker.opensuse.org/2009/03/16/what-belongs-on-announce/

Specifically:

People installing openSUSE for the first time get the “well known popup” during their first login - OK. We tell people that they should create an account on opensuse.org to participate in the wiki, bugzilla, forums, … We invite them to many places of opensuse.org - and even I didn’t know every subdomain like:

* apparmor.opensuse.org, * crashdb.opensuse.org or * lizards.opensuse.org * …

Looks like openSUSE developers again and again fall into the trap creating lots of tools and ideas without informing their users about the great stuff they do. (Sidenote: what about a list of such subdomains with their background information in the weekly news? -> Zonker, please drive this ;-)

So - what about it? Should we have a "beginner's section" in every issue of the weekly news? A boilerplate that can be in every issue, because every issue is likely to have newer openSUSE users who don't know their way around yet -- and openSUSE users who have been around for a while can simply gloss over it.

Best,

Zonker

News is not first place where new users will come (IMHO). We have whole section of links on en.opensuse.org that will be the most probable target of click: * Discover it Project Overview How to Participate Documentation Support Support Database Contact Sitemap Maybe creating link to page (right now non existant) "Discover it" would do a better job. It can be used to list much more goodies then simple menu. I guess that it should be discussed (again) the layout of the wiki, but from different perspectives (first time linux, first time opensuse, advanced user, expert, ... ). In the mean time Project overview must be refreshed with mentioned goodies. Graphically page is far from appealing to use anything on it. Plain repetition of goals "The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell ..." is not really good presentation of project in any way. Visitors already have seen very similar text on the welcome page. I can't say what average user may think of it, but I know that if I run into similar thing (repeated content, graphically poor design) that project scores many negative points right away, with question "Is that all they know - have to offer ?" What I expect to see on project overview is: - who they are - specially leading people - how they are organized - who is responsible for what - what they do - links to subprojects - last project wide news Something like: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/en/ Even Debian 'about' page is better. They are at least more verbose about who they are. BTW, Novell web page is missing that (at least in Konqueror). -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org