[maemo-community] maemo.org redesign

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>> You tell me my proposal is overloaded, I tell you your proposal is
>> oversimplistic... They are different approaches and we need to agree on
>> the approach we want, or go for a tender based on both models.  :/
> 
> May I therefore humbly suggest a hybrid approach like mine? Almost two
> halves to the page: very clear indicators for navigating confused
> people who've landed on the site to the bit relevant to them; and a
> stack of dynamic portlets showing what a fun & vibrant community the
> site represents.

I liked your proposal, mostly - apart from an impression that there was
a lot of text to take in in things like developer activity, community
activity, bug activity, and that all of this text was taking away from
what is for me the most important part of the page - getting the visitor
to where he wants to go (the 4 big boxes).

I don't see an easy way to make this more spacious (apart from picking
fewer items from feeds). I also think About maemo.org should be a
sub-page, rather than a box on the front page - one line to summarise
Maemo plus a link to an "About Maemo" page would be better.

I didn't particularly like that "Got a problem?" seems to imply
necessarily a bug - I see this group as a big catch-all for
troubleshooting docs, mailing lists, forums & IRC, and bugzilla. There
are a lot of places in Maemo where you can get help when you have a
problem. But that is a detail, I think - changing the text in the orange
box would mostly fix that as long as the page behind it was good.

Summary: Some good ideas, but still a bit texty for my liking - and I
might choose different things to stream onto the front page than mailing
list threads which can frankly get a bit off topic and scary for newbies...

Quim, I agree with you - we appear to have fundamentally different ideas
of what the front page of the site should be. I think it's a place
people visit to go somewhere else, and you think it should be a page
people return to often.

Is there any way we can get information about the visitor profiles for
maemo.org as it is now? That would be really helpful... otherwise, we
might need to do a survey to get an answer to this fundamental question
of what people expect from the page.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org