I think Fedora, with our foundation of Freedom, always includes the element of choice. Apropos of the website redesigns, one of the biggest struggles I've seen with the requirements the Board and I laid out is understanding where choice is of primary importance, and where it's not. One of the things the Board acknowledged early on in the redesign process weeks ago was that choice is important to a significant part of our community, including the KDE SIG. The KDE design philosophy, for instance, promotes choice and up-front flexibility, and people who enjoy KDE value choice accordingly. So, our goals and requirements being what they were, we did want to ensure there was a better way to present choice than our current website. The spins.fp.o redesign (which was also announced on this list) was intended to promote choice as a primary value. The current spins.fp.o is merely a torrent listing which is not only unattractive but offers no ability for Spin owners to actually promote their communities and their work. The get-fedora-all page is not materially better, because not only does it not show all choices, but it is actively confusing to users who are trying to find their choices to begin with. The new spins.fp.o design (latest mockup here [1]) does several things to value choice. First, it presents all options for spins, complete with easy access to a Download Now button that users can select for ease once they've found the spin of their choice. It also allows users to drill down into as many Spins as they like, with individual pages backing each Spin. These individual pages will feature customizable content, and each Spin owner can show off their work, and explain who/why/how to download it. As Steven Parrish wisely alluded to earlier, there's a great chance here for Spin owners to promote their work in a vastly improved way compared to our current anemic pages. For example, there can be a kde.fedoraproject.org or lxde.fedoraproject.org. These subdomains can point directly to the individual Spin community page, share a unified design with the look and feel of Fedora as seen on our other sites, but include a variety of content provided by the Spin owner. The Spin owners then have the ability when showing off their work to someone to say, "Hey, would you like a copy of this? Visit MMMM.fedoraproject.org for a free copy." The Spins site is a place where choice is a primary value, and we are still looking for ways to improve the choice opportunities there. At the same time, with this offering in place, the Board wants to make room for a get-fedora page that consciously does not set up choice as a primary value. That way we allow people who aren't in a position to make informed choice to still get a working Fedora as quickly as possible. Because the get-fedora page is not intended to act as a funnel for all needs, all Spin owners can feel comfortable promoting their Spin in the context of their individual pages. The get-fedora page is meant to serve those people, for example, who are likely to be confused by the array of options offered in Fedora, and simply need to get a start on their engagement with free and open source software. People who value choice more highly will be able to navigate using the "other options" block[2] to the spins site where they'll have a user experience that matches their expectations. Hopefully this explanation will give some perspective to the requirements underlying the website redesign, and show how our future site will be more attractive and functional for as many people as possible, whatever they value most from Fedora. * * * [1] http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/woot/spins-directory.6.png [2] http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/woot/getfpo-16.png -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
