[Web Comm] Website map ...

[Jason Birch]

I agree with you entirely on this Jody.  It's hard to shift mindset from
the portal that we're forced into with the current CN infrastructure,
and perhaps we need to look at how we're doing the migration.  We can't
just transfer over the existing content, we need to focus on
proselytization, or smothering them with love :)  It's good to hear your
perspectives on this, it's helping clarify our requirements.

Perhaps we do need two sites, www.osgeo.org, and community.osgeo.org.
Www would be for marketing, and community would be for existing users
that want to interact, share blogs, etc?

One of the problems here is new content; I have tried to do some work on
this, but time constraints have killed me on this.

Thought:  one user group that we've missed is proprietary software
companies.  If we can get involvement from LizardTech (because they want
to give back for the use of GDAL, etc) and Autodesk (because they want
to make their development cycle more reactive and gain market share), we
should be looking at what marketing message can be used to attract
others.

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Jody Garnett [mailto:jgarnett at refractions.net] 
Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2006 08:28
To: dev at webcommittee.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Web Comm] Website map ...

Hi Jason thanks for the discussion, I am going to keep coming at this
from left field for a couple of days as I would like to confirm that the
track we are on is intentional.

Looks like we have a lot of wishes in common in terms of findability and
so on ...  Somethings like individual projects and committees do not
belong anywhere near top level navigation aids (projects as a list will
not scale as you point out).

My concern is for a visitor to the website (let me try and take a hard
line here for comment) - they are not interested in:
- our projects - they instead want to see the big picture and then
product comparisons
- our committees - these are internals to how we run our organization -
they only mean something to us the community (This hard line *does* fail
- the fact that we have regional groups is of interest to our
international visitor story.)

So let me be clear - we have been creating a website/portal to serve our
community. That is easy to do, we are after all the community. What the
webcom group needs to be responsible for is the "visitor" community,
this is not feedback we are going to get from our memebers ... it
appears to fall within our scope.

In software you have the idea of a "customer champion", what we need
here is a "visitor champion" and I would like the webcomm committee to
play that role.

So I would like us to not to look at the graphic design right now, and
instead focus on what content we are trying to organize and for whom, we
will come back to the graphic design with a much more focused website
that serves a different group of users.

Cheers,
Jody
> Hey, that's cool seeing it visually, and I think that there is real
value in visualizing potential user paths to ensure that we cover off
all potential navigation requirements.
>  
> Findability is an important concept here.  If we make our content
"findable" then we also have to structure the site to be as interlinked
as possible.  We need to provide the ability to users to quickly get to
the content that they might be interested in regardless of their landing
page.  This means a consistent and multi-dimensional site structure.  
>  
> I like what Tyler and Jo have done getting the projects and committees
on the left, but I think that this needs to be a multi-level menu, and
the urls should reflect it.  So project info sheets would be under
projects/geotools/, committee pages would be under
committees/webcommittee/, and foundation stuff would be under
foundation/governance, etc.  I've attached a couple images of a Drupal
site that I maintain (I think it may even be using the same template)
showing how this would sort of look, though my breadcrumbs and URLs suck
because I'm stuck on IIS and can't use mod_rewrite.
>  
> We also need a breadcrumb area at the top of each page, so users can
intuitively work their way up the directory structure from their current
page rather than having to bounce up to the main page.  If you find
yourself trimming parts of the URL to try to get up a level, we've done
something wrong on the site design.
>  
> If we provide enough intuitive paths, all users will be able to find 
> what they want.  And for those obstinate few that prefer search to 
> find (browse), Drupal nicely searches all content. :)
>  
> I'm not sure how I feel about the member blogs (I often blog about
non-OS stuff) incidentally.  I don't know if this is appropriate on the
main page of the site or not...
>  
> Jason
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Jody Garnett [mailto:jgarnett at refractions.net]
> Sent: Wed 2006-10-11 9:00 PM
> To: dev at webcommittee.osgeo.org
> Subject: [Web Comm] Website map ...
>
>
>
> I am a bit concerned that this planning artifact I have asked for is 
> not specific enough.
>   
>>    * website map, optimize "workflow" for target users, pending
>>     
> Here is a sample to get conversation going, I have put together a 
> website map based on the what I can reverse engineer of the drupal 
> site prototype (http://community.osgeo.org/en).
>
> I tried to run through the site with a couple example users, and did 
> not get very far - this only illustrates the technique.
>
> Cheers,
> Jody
> Note: the file is in Open Office (just because I know Jo will like it 
> that way)
>
>
>
>
>   
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