On 11 Jan 2018, at 21:03, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Dear colleagues,
Full disclosure: I was a member of the IAOC when some of this work was
approved, so to some extent I bear some responsibility.
On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 09:28:15PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
The Number 1 thing to remember when revamping a Web site: nobody
cares
about the revamping of your Web site.
It seems to me that this discussion was one we had during the last
round, and I think that many IETF participants seem not to have
absorbed the other part of what was going on with the website
alterations. The reason for this was not to make work, but to solve a
problem.
People want the Web site to work for whatever task they have to do,
and preferably, they want it to work the same way as before. (This is
probably why many IETFers did not test the new site: they didn't want
to have a new site.)
It is certanly true that people want the site to work for their task,
and when they have a workflow they don't want that interrupted. But
the previous discussion of this pointed out that there was a
significant constituency of potential users of the website to whom it
was not addressed at all; that was a problem.
People who don't know what an IETF is sometimes have occasion to need
to know, and what they will do is put "IETF" into their favourite way
of searching and end up at the front website page. If that front page
is overwhelmingly arranged to meet the needs of those who already know
what an IETF is, then the new curious people will effectively be
turned away. This has been a problem for the IETF in its relationship
with others: it makes it harder to persuade others that the IETF
really is offering useful, contemporary standards for how the Internet
does and should work.
I agree and would like to thank all the people who put time and effort
into this new site. It saddens me to see a bunch of complaints (and
plain rudeness in some cases) as the immediate response to change.
The site is not perfect, I don’t really like long vertical scrolling
pages but these are things that can be improved upon in the future.
John
John Dickinson
http://sinodun.com
Sinodun Internet Technologies Ltd.
Magdalen Centre
Oxford Science Park
Robert Robinson Avenue
Oxford OX4 4GA
U.K.