Website Suggestions

No site is perfect, this site is no different there. Please feel free to add your thoughts here as to what needs improving.

-- block start: edited by Roman --

My main concern is with the home and introductory pages, because I think they are very important, among other things, because for newcomers they represent people behind the project and its activity and health. Is like to give a good first impression. Why to focus on newcomers? In my opinion, one of the main OS project goals is to attract visitors and collaborators, show the best of the project and act like calling clients in the bazaar. So I will focus mainly on those areas.

- I like the idea of building the menu out of hexagons. In my opinion the hexagon menu design (looks like a hive menu, but is that a flower?) on the Documentation page looks more organized, I mean has cleaner visual composition than the one on the home page.
- I think that the "What is Kamaelia?" hexagon from the Documentation page is important enough to be present on the home page.
- I think that the OS projects that are driven by many people, must have a presentation page that welcomes newcomers. This means that the home page must have only the necessary links: I would omit the detailed "Recent Changes" section, the Current Status and the Mailing lists section on the home page so it may fit in one or two monitor screens. I like very much the RubyonRails home page, but I do not mean that Kamaelia's web should look like just another rails clone.
- I guess any news are better than no news, specially if they are located on the main page, so the project will look more active to visitors (actual news are 5 months old).
- When I visit a new site, in the HOME page, I automatically start looking for a single menu containing names that look familiar, it is like a pattern that I follow searching for links like, for example: "about", "download", "contact us", "news", "documentation" "tutorials" "case studies/use cases" "partners" "site map" "search" "blog" "wiki" (well, the site is a wiki :))). While there are already most of those links (I think the about link is a must), I guess they must be arrenged in a clean menu, the hive of hexagons looks nice, but the links are repeated from the text menu on the top right corner, I find that redundancy confusing.
I like the way pages like the How and Why present their content. Maybe we can present other web sections (i.e. Introduction, Tutorials, News) like a storytelling, guiding the new visitor from page to page with brief info and suggesting further reading when appropiate through links. Introduction and tutorials may follow the same model.
Well that is what I observed. Maybe I am not very specific, but I think the whole home page has to be rearrenged with newbies in mind. The people familiar with the project may have less fancy and more technical pages available deeper in the web tree.

PD: Project Blog is not accesible and SummerOfCode still points to the SOC 2006 page.

-- block end: edited by Roman --

-- block start: 13 April 2007 - Matt --

Suggest we change the "LEARN what's under the hood" hexagon on the home page and docs page to link to this page instead of directly to the mini axon tutorial. Why? because some people (eg. me) might interpret it as meaning go here for tutorials/learning/reference stuff about how Axon/Kamaelia works. The suggested page still prominently directs people to the mini axon tutorial, but also provides other options. To my mind, it also places the tutorial into a context where they can subsequently move on to find out more (ie. gives someone other places to go to when they've done the tutorial)

-- block end: 13 April 2007 - Matt --

RSS for recent changes
MAIL OUTs for recent changes

-- Michael, 5th June 08

-- block start: 5 June 2008 - Jason --

• I'd like to see a reference to the CDML codes the site uses.
• (Basic) reference to CDML added to the website here: /Wiki -- Michael, 7th June.
  
  
• A search function would be really nice (but I know it may be a tad hard to implement).
• http://edit.kamaelia.org/Developers/Projects/KamaeliaPublish/ and http://edit.kamaelia.org/Developers/Projects/KamaeliaPublish bring up two different webpages.
• This is not a bug, this is by (conscious) design. You can make then have the same text by doing an include. This is what /Components does. -- Michael, 7th June.
  
  

-- block end: 5 June 2008 - Jason --