Hi Tom,
It was an interesting and thoughtful perspective, and thank you for
taking the time to recount it.
I prefer
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/bbnG0Hny0SpccJIZsGp72A?feat=directlink
because it has less information and looks prettier.Sadly, that seems to be what people want. Information confuses people and seems
to need to be on subsequent pages. Also the picture on
Well, that is the way we'll probably go. This content was an
"emergency job" intended to allow the site to be launched, and
everything will be up for review.
http://test.libreoffice.org
took ages to appear and people don't seem to have patience beyond a couple of
milliseconds and when it appeared the first image was 'horribly' complicated.
Isn't it a gif? Could it be less size byte-wise?
It's a .png. I did all the other screenshots as high-quality .jpg
files because they are half to a third of the size, but the site's
lead admin prefers .png because of resizing considerations.
By contrast competitors websites show almost nothing and give almost no
information. We see pictures of smart people in suits looking at a flashy
computer. We see pictures of grannies leaning over toddlers both engaged with
whatever is going on on a more sensible looking computer. We see a young
attractive 'housewife' sitting on over-large creamy coloured sofa either posing
sexily or demurely (or both) and looking at a flashy laptop. If we ever see the
screen then there is some simple pie-chart of bar-graph or sometimes they risk
showing a line-graph (for business users).
Maybe you're right. We'll have a think about it over Christmas,
because it looks like the site won't roll out until January.
Personally i do like the narrower format because i have not yet followed
'everyone else' to widescreen. Also for me personally (probably fairly
typically for a linux user) i do prefer having useful information right there
fast without having to dig around for it and the picture is what i personally
like as a linux-user because it show me useful stuff. The info was well
written, compelling and succinct, telling me exactly the sorts of things that
people ask whenever they find me using OpenOffice (one that still has the Sun
logo). However, while it may be great for existing linux-users we are not
typical of the general population out-there that we need to reach.
Well, where I live, very few people have wide screens. So what you say
in that respect is an important consideration. I'm glad you liked the
content. Maybe I'll just move it off the front page to another
location, as you suggest.
I do think both are great and both do the job of easy access to the download.
The text needs to be somewhere on the site and preferably just 1 click away or
reached when the page is scrolled down, something easy.
See above...
I would say keep the one we have already or switch to the one that is closest to
completion whichever one that is.
There are actually going to be two sites. One for LibreOffice, the
software, and one for The Document Foundation, the "umbrella
organization" fostering the project.
PS this is only my opinion and i might be a little bitter and twisted nowadays
Your thoughts were interesting and very enlightening. Please do stay
around the project.
If you'd like a suggestion of an area to get involved in, you might
like to consider the documentation team. Do sign up for the list at
documentation+subscribe@libreoffice.org if you have time to give.
We're a small team, but we are acquiring some fine members - we don't
discuss quite so much as on the other lists, but the team members are
cooperative, friendly people who quietly *produce* high quality work.
Thanks for your feedback, and read you next time.
David Nelson