Scoofy12
10-04-2005, 09:45 AM
i posted this a couple days ago, but the thread was already dead, so apparently nobody read it. and maybe all this has been said before and i wasnt paying attention. but disclaimers aside...
For those that aren't aware, there's been printing of T-shirts and other wearable FDC paraphernalia in the FAD forum, which got me thinking about this, but even regardless of that, if we are going to be effectively "advertising" free-dc in this way, (or even for other recruiting/info purposes, really), our home page should be a little more newbie-friendly (especially since most of us probably don't use it and come straight to the forums anyway)... really i think there's 2 classes of people who we should care about.
1. someone who sees the t-shirt and says "hey, my computer can help cure cancer?" and goes to our site, not really knowing anything about DC in general, free-dc in particular, or any projects specifically. they will need to know "what is DC", "how do i do it" and "what is free-dc". ideally it should be really easy to find answers to these questions within one click of the home page.
right now the home-page shows forum threads and news (which makes sense given the forum-centric nature of the community) but isnt terribly inviting to someone with a short attention span, not much knowledge of DC, and not enough interest (yet) to dig deeper.
i think there should be an answer to the question "what is DC, and how can my computer help cure disease, advance science, or maybe even win me some prize money?"
there is an "about" link at the top, and in fact it does answer these questions... but i think it should be more distinguished from the rest of the links, though, so as to be obvious to someone new that they should click there. another suggestion is to maybe add a heading that says "what is distributed computing" or something to the section that answers that question.
and of course, the "what is free-dc" answer will hopefully get these folks involved here, and also be useful for the second of the aformentioned 2 classes of people: those who may have found out about a specific project somehow else, but have no team, and they hear of this free-dc team that does cool stuff. that was me a few years back, and the state of the site was basically the same... i had to wander my way into the forums before i found out anything substantive. forums are great for connecting people, but terrible for actual dissemination of information, IMO, due to their organization and difficulty of searching.
oh, and one more nit to pick... why is the default content height so small?
on the whole though, i like the design, it can just benefit from a little tweaking.
just my $.02USD
For those that aren't aware, there's been printing of T-shirts and other wearable FDC paraphernalia in the FAD forum, which got me thinking about this, but even regardless of that, if we are going to be effectively "advertising" free-dc in this way, (or even for other recruiting/info purposes, really), our home page should be a little more newbie-friendly (especially since most of us probably don't use it and come straight to the forums anyway)... really i think there's 2 classes of people who we should care about.
1. someone who sees the t-shirt and says "hey, my computer can help cure cancer?" and goes to our site, not really knowing anything about DC in general, free-dc in particular, or any projects specifically. they will need to know "what is DC", "how do i do it" and "what is free-dc". ideally it should be really easy to find answers to these questions within one click of the home page.
right now the home-page shows forum threads and news (which makes sense given the forum-centric nature of the community) but isnt terribly inviting to someone with a short attention span, not much knowledge of DC, and not enough interest (yet) to dig deeper.
i think there should be an answer to the question "what is DC, and how can my computer help cure disease, advance science, or maybe even win me some prize money?"
there is an "about" link at the top, and in fact it does answer these questions... but i think it should be more distinguished from the rest of the links, though, so as to be obvious to someone new that they should click there. another suggestion is to maybe add a heading that says "what is distributed computing" or something to the section that answers that question.
and of course, the "what is free-dc" answer will hopefully get these folks involved here, and also be useful for the second of the aformentioned 2 classes of people: those who may have found out about a specific project somehow else, but have no team, and they hear of this free-dc team that does cool stuff. that was me a few years back, and the state of the site was basically the same... i had to wander my way into the forums before i found out anything substantive. forums are great for connecting people, but terrible for actual dissemination of information, IMO, due to their organization and difficulty of searching.
oh, and one more nit to pick... why is the default content height so small?
on the whole though, i like the design, it can just benefit from a little tweaking.
just my $.02USD