-- and it should probably have a better link text
-- I mean, imagine reading it; Get Fedora 11 Desktop Edition Now
INSTALLABLE LIVE CD!
YES
I'm not following at all...
Yeah, I wasn't really clear...
Current http://fedoraproject.org site: tiny blue "--> Get Fedora" on the
middle of the left side"
Compare to, say, http://www.ubuntu.com/ - banner stretching across the
top with "Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition / Save time and boot faster / Get
productive with the latest apps / Enjoy an improved user experience" and
then a high-contrast "Download" (and "Take the Tour") button right below
that text.
Maybe we don't need *all* that stuff, but it's more descriptive and a
lot easier to find.
Great point - do we have any heuristics that we're evaluating our sites
against, any standard tests we run for sanity? (Making sure it works on
a certain list of screen sizes, a certain set of browsers, that kind of
thing?)
800x600 and up is reasonable. 400-500 px wide isn't quite as reasonable.
That's a totally reasonable minimum bar - I think we just need to make
clear somewhere that that *is* the minimum bar, and that problems at
lower resolutions are a wontfix. I started
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Websites/Heuristics to try and keep track
of ideas for this - it's very much a draft, but I'm wondering whether
having a good set of rules-of-thumb might help us answer "it breaks in
this case, do we care about this case?" questions in the future.
Trying to think out loud why someone might have less than 800px width:
* Viewing fp.o on a mobile browser is probably an edge case and can be
ignored (stats could prove me wrong, though - I wonder how to get access
to those stats... maybe Ian might have some ideas)
* Someone on an 800+px wide display might have two windows open
side-by-side (comparing the Fedora homepage with the Gentoo homepage, or
surfing the web on the left side of his/her screen and reading email on
the right). This sounds more plausible to me; my laptop is 1024x768 and
it's not uncommon for me to have two browser windows side by side, each
filling up half my screen (so, accounting for scrollbars and such,
somewhere around 500px width each).
-- most people who visit your site won't want a tour. They want a
download link.
Really? I wonder if there is a good way we can empirically prove this.
Why would I expend energy to download an operating system if I don't
understand what it is I would be getting for the effort?
Also thinking off the top of my head... I think a better reason might be
"some people will already come to fp.o knowing that they want to dl
Fedora, even before taking the tour. Who are they?"
* someone (I trust, possibly an Ambassador standing beside me) has
already told me I should just download this "Fedora" thing and they'll
help me get started
* I do understand what I'd be getting; I already know what Fedora is and
just need to grab an image file and am easily frustrated by Fitt's Law
* some people blithely click on download links first, then figure out
what they're getting afterwards. Not that it's a good idea, mind you...
but I've watched enough people have this as almost a knee-jerk reaction
to a webpage that... I mean, it happens.
All my reasoning in this email and my previous one are a lot more
hand-wavy conjecturing than I'd like. I need to sit down and learn how
to get hold of our actual website stats, so I can base these kinds of
statements on Actual Data.
--Mel
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