[steering-discuss] Website status

Hi Tom, :slight_smile:

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.
:wink:

Thanks for your feedback, and read you next time. :slight_smile:

David Nelson

Hi :slight_smile:

I think it is more important to tantalise our target market, to get them keen to
try it. Satisfying people is unhelpful as we need people motivated rather than
complacent.

Curiosity enticed me into trying Linux and then outrage at the realisation of
the amount of time wasted for me by MicroSquish systems (that are designed to be
vulnerable and difficult to fix) encouraged me to stay. The question is how can
we encourage others to try OpenSource? Perhaps a similar route to mine or a
different one per person. How do other products market themselves? Our/your
product is better but how do we get people to want to try it?

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi, :slight_smile:

PS this is only my opinion and i might be a little bitter and twisted nowadays

My favorite cartoon is Dilbert [1] ... At least one knows one isn't
alone in one's views. ;-D

[1] http://dilbert.com/register/

David Nelson

Hi David :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile: I have a very specific agenda at the moment and got side-tracked by
the website issue because of the sites i work on. The ones here look great.

Images
I really dislike jpgs because of the distortions they go through in editing.
Png seems to get much less errors in compression and allows transparency and
animation (obviously) and it's not a proprietary format but it is large. I tend
to keep originals in png or high-quality jpg. Gif is very light-weight better
for websites and is usually best for logos but its colour-range and other
limitations means it can't always be used. With Gimp it is usually quite fast
to "Save As.. " png first and then as gif so that you can fall-back on the png
if the gif goes pixellated or weird.

I hesitate to show the site i work on because my bosses actually prefer some
very clunky and nasty things and i still haven't quite worked out how to sort
templates in joomla so that article pages are restricted into the page defined
in the template. They are fun to work with and a very noble & worthy cause tho
:slight_smile:
http://www.cecf.co.uk

Hmm, now you wont respect me lol. My criticisms of that site would fill
volumes.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi all,

just for the record - there has been another proposal for a menu and the
front page of the new website.

Some of you might know Nikash, who already worked within the OOo days on
designs - and usually they are simply great :slight_smile: However, he wrote a very
kind mail, proposed some changes, and published a website mockup:
http://www.mail-archive.com/design@libreoffice.org/msg00217.html

Cheers,
Christoph

Hi, :slight_smile:

Hi all,

just for the record - there has been another proposal for a menu and the
front page of the new website.

Some of you might know Nikash, who already worked within the OOo days on
designs - and usually they are simply great :slight_smile: However, he wrote a very
kind mail, proposed some changes, and published a website mockup:
http://www.mail-archive.com/design@libreoffice.org/msg00217.html

I think it looks really good [1].

As a secondary project, the basic
design could also easily be adapted for the wiki and
documentfoundation.org (nabble, too?), using the same
design with other colors from the marketing color scheme.

I've got SSH access to work on a sandbox at pumbaa.ooodev.org
(http://188.40.32.145:7780/), so we could implement the design as a
SilverStripe theme there, and Christian could move it across to the
upcoming libreoffice.org site when ready.

I'll be happy to collaborate with him out with the theme
implementation aspect, and to do the necessary content adaptation /
design to fit in with it.

@Christoph, it sounds like you're agreeable to the idea.

@Bernard: you too?

@christian: you too?

If so, when can we give Nik a green light to start work? :wink:

[1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:Nik#Interim_Website_Design_proposals

David Nelson

Hi David,

thanks for your mail ... I think the best thing is to also forward it to
the Design team list, and to him (BCC). Let's see how it evolves :slight_smile:

And to all: Sorry for constantly spamming multiple lists at the same
time - the remaining work should be done on one list only.

Cheers,
Christoph

Hi, :slight_smile:

thanks for your mail ... I think the best thing is to also forward it to
the Design team list, and to him (BCC). Let's see how it evolves :slight_smile:

Sure. I just hope we manage to take a fast decision about this, and
*get it done* without too much futzing around. :smiley:

David Nelson

Hi David, *;

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.

That was a misunderstanding then. I wrote for origininal size
screenshots, png is almost everytime superior to jpeg. But the more
you resize, the more "fuzz" is added to the image, jpeg then provides
better compression.
So to summarize:
* png for real-size screenshots, never jpeg (unless the screenshots
shows draw showing a photograph or similar)
* jpeg is OK for thumbnails, resized screenshots

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.

Ho ho ho :slight_smile: Santa has a present for you :slight_smile: - site is live - yay :slight_smile:

[...]

Merry Christmas to everyone :slight_smile:

ciao
Christian

Hi Christian, David, all!

> 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.

Ho ho ho :slight_smile: Santa has a present for you :slight_smile: - site is live - yay :slight_smile:

A lot of thanks - to all the people who participated :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Christoph

David, you've really done an outstanding job, and I've not been able to support you as much as I would have liked to (but I have been killed by my work burden). If you need some help I am available next week, as I'm at home resting as much as I can before another year of duty.

Hi Italo, all, :slight_smile:

I'm very happy to see the site launched. A really big thanks to
Christian for making that happen. :slight_smile:

It currently looks like I might get a go-ahead to work on a really
great new theme for the site with Nikash Singh, to be ready by the
early days of the New Year... So there's still more work to do, but
the site could look really Web 2.0 and good.

I'm waiting for a response about that from Florian, Christoph and
Charles in a mail that's awaiting their urgent attention in their
mailboxes. :wink:

Italo, as a key player in marketing, I created an account for you on
the site. I mailed you your password, etc. I can tutor you online
concerning working on content, if you like, via Skype. Just buzz me if
you want that. Until then, you *might* like to submit me any content
you want published, until such time as the SC takes decisions about
editorial organization, etc.

David Nelson