Hey Henne,
On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 6:03 AM, Henne Vogelsang
Hey,
finally some real discussion about this :-)
On 03.08.2015 04:23, Manu Gupta wrote:
First of all, the design of the landing page is awesome!!!! Kudos to everyone who worked on it.
I can only concur. I like how it turned out visually! :-)
I have always believed that the openSUSE Project is different from the openSUSE Distro. By calling openSUSE as a Linux OS, we are ignoring the fact that the we are not just a distro. One may argue that Tools describe other projects but then we come off more strongly as a distro rather than a community.
It's a matter of what you are trying to sell, and to whom.
Very well said.
You can create a landing page that tells people who visit it the whole truth and nothing but the truth about openSUSE. A story about all the different aspects of our community, all the nitty gritty details.
Or you can try to think about why people most likely come to this page and then try to satisfy this "need". And maybe, in the course of doing that, draw them in further to things that matter to us.
A large percentage of the ~45K/day users who visit that page are looking for information about our distribution. All of the data (Referrer, Keywords, Exit pages) that is available to us through our tracking (piwik) supports this. So www.opensuse.org should try _very hard_ to 'sell' our distribution. Selling in this case means of course that people _WANT_ to download the iso to install it. The rest (project, community, tools, news etc.) is not really important to the visitor, only to us.
Sadly neither the old page nor the new page do a very good job at that. The page in it's current form is pretty obscure what openSUSE is about (packages? distribution? tools?) and the _main_ action (download the iso!) is hidden behind a choice I can't possibly make as openSUSE beginner. Not even I myself am sure, with 15+ years contributing to openSUSE under my belt, if I should use Tumbleweed or Leap!
Agreed. Right now we are orienting the users towards different distributions. So, the web page tells that Tumbleweed is a fast rolling distribution and Leap is openSUSE's latest regular release version. If you read again and again, we actually do not make them exclusive for users. A better way should be to play to user's preferences. -->Do you prefer speed or Are you a developer? Use Tumbleweed --> Do you want a stable system that just works? Use Leap --> Do you want LTS? Use Evergreen On that, Evergreen is nowhere to be found. A lot of sysadmins will use it and use it. Evergreen deserves its corner on the landing page if we are talking about sysadmins and target audience. As far as I know, sometimes the latest in not the best and this is where we have opportunity to differentiate.
Second, the contributions corner. It is uninviting for non-technical contributors. There is no mention of it and it does not help at all with the issues we are already facing
It's again a matter of focus. What do we want that the majority of people that visit this page do?
Again, Yes but do we want to exclude non-technical contributors? By showing that we are well telling we don't need any non-technical contributions which is disrespectful of the people who worked as ambassadors, artwork contributors, organized conferences, wrote news articles, edited wiki pages, helped on documentation, translation to name a few. That being said, I also believe that if we keep on treading this path, more non-technical contributors will leave. If you click on code and read the description, it asks for technical as well as non-technical contribution. How about this - Contribute, by lending a hand and then when you click the description pops up. Instead of hardware, in Kind -> and then when you click, ask people to donate hardware. 3rd Machinery, Why it even there? Is this an openSUSE Project and deserves to be on the landing page? A quick Google shows https://github.com/SUSE/machinery It shows that it is a SUSE Project. Are we not trying to differentiate between SUSE and openSUSE. This is so much against what we are trying to work for. Fourth, Conferences? Really. Is openSUSE only about conferences. Conferences are yearly events. Now, it is good to show events on the landing page. But, is it more important than directing people towards our own infrastructure like the wiki, forums, irc, build service etc? That is a question we need to ask.
I hope the people who are working on it give thought about it.
I'm not even sure that they read this list...
Henne
-- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
-- Regards Manu Gupta -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org