Hi Riccardo,
Am 14.02.2024 um 11:23 schrieb Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it>:
Hi Lars, lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de wrote: Hi dear GNUsteppers,
I lately came across a website which impressed me by its usefulness and simplicity:
https://www.qemu.org
It impressed me with its clearness and to the point information: you can see everything important at a glance:
It is indeed a quite terse home page. Remember, they have a simpler task: they need to present a single application. We have a little bit a more complicated task: we are a whole project: framework, libraries, apps.
Thats true, they have a very restricted use case. We have several …
On the top there are the most important links (Download, Support, Contribute, Docs, Wiki, Blog), followed by a big logo and title as well as a one sentence description of the project.
Then follows a section of three Screenshots, which each show a certain aspect of QEMU in detail.
I think as far as navigation goes, we have a decent setup, but our home page is crammed with information. We agreed on this years ago. Why? we wanted to put everything on the front, correct all misconceptions at once, present most at once. We are a framework, we are portable, we appeal end-users, we have end-user apps. We wanted to push everything in one place, somehow a committee failure because "a is more important than b" and tried prominence to everything.
One thing, that comes to my mind now, is that maybe our information is not in the right structure. What I wanted to say is, we may have not too much information but insufficiently structured information: I mean at first we maybe should make a list of information what we want to communicate, group that information into chunks which belong together and can go on one page, find a sentence which expresses that all that information is on that page and then link it from home using this sentence. Having like a teaser -> article structure.
I guess the first step would be to collect all the topics we want to put on the website and then to structure, group and rate it. We could use the wiki for that purpose. What do you think?
Like for instance, collect at first:
GNUStep is …
… for Developers -> Screenshot of a development scenario (e.g. GORM Project Builder and so on) -> link to Developers page with documentation
… for Users -> Screenshot of a desktop with -> a link to a Users page
… themable
…
… not Window Maker (little joke, sorry couldn’t resist)
Then sort and rate it (not everything has to end up at the home page). We could, for instance reduce the copy text on the homepage to just:
GNUstep is a [free software](-> Link to fsf.org or gnu.org) implementation of [Apple’s Cocoa Frameworks](-> Link to Cocoa Documentation at Apple) (formerly [NeXT's OpenStep](-> Link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep )) for [Application Development](-> Link to Developer subpage at gnustep.org).
GNUstep can be used to create a desktop environment. (Here we could place a link to a reference implementation)
We have more than one :)
Then maybe wee should have a subpage for those desktop projects.
GNUstep is not Window Maker and [Window Maker is not GNUstep](-> Link to https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html ).
That part can be of a second page, really.. as it is now
Then I would propose to follow the Concept of the QEMU homepage closely:
show three recent screenshots, ideally with theming running on various OSes including Windows. Short explanation of what it shows below.
All this followed by I recent releases section and at the very bottom the legal stuff like imprint, link to bug reporter and such stuff.
I would skip that part completely! E.g. bug reporting is always prominent in a menu - currently under External (which doesn't make that more sense as a section being on github...)
This is just my proposal, I am open for discussion, so let’s discuss this (also since we are on discuss-gnustep@gnu.org here). The more involvement the better, I am not saying my ideas are perfect or such, I post those to get the ball rolling towards a better GNUstep Homepage!
Let's discuss if we can push the information "down one" into the respective pages, which we already have, and clean up the home page... I'll attempt that. I am for it. Reading the rest of the discussion, others have a harder idea. We have the navigation menu already in the home page, so we can really simplify the section if we wish. I'll attempt a gradual approach. Riccardo
Kind regards,
Lars
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