[Web Comm] Website map ...

Thu Oct 12 11:50:57 EDT 2006

I'm following this thread with great interest.  

+1 on considering who our visitors are making sure they're needs are covered.

I also think that the visitor side and community sides need to be only a hairs-width apart, so that a visitor can, with a simple click, get a feelf or the active nature of the community and what is generally going on.  You know, to go from "this group sounds interesting" to "oh, wow, they are doing stuff and look active..here's the area that I'm interested in joining up with"..

Just a brief note to say +1 and that my silence is agreement :)

Tyler

----- Original Message -----
From: Jason Birch <Jason.Birch at nanaimo.ca>
Date: Thursday, October 12, 2006 8:44 am
Subject: RE: [Web Comm] Website map ...

> 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'tjust 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 
> willnot 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 
> interlinkedas possible.  We need to provide the ability to users 
> to quickly get to
> the content that they might be interested in regardless of their 
> landingpage.  This means a consistent and multi-dimensional site 
> structure.  
> >  
> > I like what Tyler and Jo have done getting the projects and 
> committeeson 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 
> currentpage 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 
> donesomething 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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