I take the advice from Sepeck and start a new thread on "What should go on the front page".
I would like drupal.org to sell Drupal to new - non tech - users, who do not know this stuff already.
drupal.org is the first point of contact and should be put to the best use possible.
So we need some STRONG selling points up front. I have a few ideas that I posted in another thread and which I post here as well:
Why install Drupal and not one of the hundreds of other open source CMS packages, Portal systems, Blogging tools etc?
- Because Drupal is a mature system with a very large, active and well functioning developer community.
- Because Drupal is on the fast track in expanding its usefulness for every concievable kind of web2.0 project.
- Because Drupal is so incredibly well integrated.
If you want a system to build on and to outlast your next few wild ideas - install Drupal!
Who are some web-celebrities who use Drupal? And what do they say that can help you make a decision?
- Doc Searls,
- Marc Canter
- The Bryght team (Roland Tanglao)
- Yahoo
- Christina Wodtke
- Dan Gillmor
What is it that makes Drupal stand out?
This will make it clear that the nukes are techically inferior to Drupal, that some other systems are too hard to learn and manage, that some other systems are much more shallow in scope, that some other systems are developed by teams of one etc..)
This is what should be on the front page of drupal.org.
Because it sells Drupal to those who have not yet made a decision. Most of those who have not made a decision will NOT search for this and they will not go beyond the front page to find the information. Some of this information is already available on drupal.org. It is just not easily found.
Comments
Maybe
Maybe I put this thread in the wrong place.
Anyone able to move it?
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
I wouldn't put all of this on the front page
Instead, I would put a somewhat prominent link called "New to Drupal?" near the top with a fancy graphic that links to this kind of information.
Exactly not
Everybody but the guy new to Drupal will click a link to find what he's looking for.
The guy new to Drupal should have what he is looking for on the front page.
That's what I'm proposing.
so - no links please.
:-)
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
I disagree
Most thinking people get turned off by overt advertising. If they sense someone is trying to sell them something or push something hard, their defenses go up. It would be a bad mistake to turn the Drupal home page into an obnoxious "Buy This!" piece. Subtlety and understatment are much more powerful techniques for getting your message heard.
Instead of one large advertisment to one slice of the audience, the centerpiece of the frontpage should be the news about Drupal, as it currently is.
I disagree
I never proposed not to communicate properly.
Actually what I propose is to get some trustworthy people to testify that Drupal rocks, and to give concrete examples of why Drupal is better than the rest.
I firmly believe that Drupal is better than the rest.
I also think that telling the truth is not obnoxious.
Ethos is not about understatement, but about trust.
I've been doing professional communications for many years, and I'm convinced we do not do a good job of selling Drupal on the frontpage of drupal.org. Not to newbies that is.
Hitherto I've been hesitant to say we should, because I thought that Drupal would do better growing slowly in the smaller community, but now Drupal is getting airborne, and lots of people are flocking to this site and to this software, and Drupal is finally ready for it. So we need to cater to those people in the best way that we can.
My specific suggestions are probably way off (English is my second language and I spend 15 seconds writing them), but the idea is right.
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
The debate is over how much space to devote on the front page
If Drupal is the best, and I think it is, too, then it will sell itself. Good products sell themselves. As I mentioned, Google sold itself by having a great product. That didn't need to buy $2 million dollar Super Bowl ads or do any advertising at all, for that matter.
Drupal's audience will generally be very smart, technically saavy folks. Even most of the newbies. We're not selling soap or soda pop or a product that needs to appeal to a mass audience. Advertising needs to be targeted to its audience. A big advertisement on the front page would not appeal to this kind of audience.
And it will be these smart, technically-oriented people who will do the real selling of Drupal when they tell their coworkers, friends, and relatives about Drupal. We shouldn't be going after the newbie crowd at this point. Drupal should appeal to the leaders in the crowd. The newbies are going to listen to them and copy what they are doing.
But all this said, I'm not saying not to put your ideas up somewhere on the site, I just think it's a very bad idea to put all these ideas on the front page.
"Good products sell
"Good products sell themselves." (SIC!)
??????????
Not my experience.
Unfortunately.
Products that sell are those that people know. If there's a crowd of superficially similar products competing for attention, then the most talked about and most widely used products will win market share. That's called power laws. The winners are the products that are aggressively marketed and get the attention. It's not often the best technology that wins.
Think Microsoft.
-----
And initially I did not think that we should ever consider doing marketing, but if we want to - please do it right. There's no point in wanting marketing and growth, but not wanting to play by the rules.
Anybody thougth of Guerilla Marketing (well - having a-list bloggers and technorati use Drupal is sort of Guerilla Marketing) or Virus Marketing??
What about a video? A game?
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
You contradict yourself
First you say: "If there's a crowd of superficially similar products competing for attention, then the most talked about and most widely used products will win market share." I agree and as I've already stated, word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising, especially in the open source community. But then, in the next sentence, you say: "The winners are the products that are aggressively marketed and get the attention."
Yes, this is true if you are talking about toothpaste and soda pop, not open source software. How did Bittorrent, the Perl programming language, PHP, Apache, Mambo, Plone, Drupal get to be popular in the first place? Because they were good products, not through big advertising budgets. Your analogy to Microsoft is way off base. If Linux had been sold with IBM PCs in the 1980, we'd all be using it on our desktop right now. Microsoft won their preeminence with that one very lucky stroke of landing a deal with IBM.
By the way, take a look at Plone's home page. The devote 80% of it describing what Plone is. Has it helped? Not at all. Plone is losing market share because it's not the right tool for the job for more modes sites. See http://drupal.org/node/18834.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
No I don't
Nysus,
I don't think I contradict myself.
Read my post again and try to understand what I mean instead of attacking me.
I don't disagree that word of mouth is very powerful - not just in Open Source. But we can only do so much of that. The second best thing is to find well known people who will testify. I suggest that we find some of those.
Microsoft continued to win marketshare for a long time. Not just because of the deal with IBM, but because "when everybody else has it - I want it too". That is exactly what I'm saying when I say that the most widely used product wins market share. It goes for Microsoft too. And don't tell me that Microsoft is not into aggressive marketing :-).
Bittorrent, the Perl programming language, PHP and Apache are really quite irrelevant here, because most of the new users are not programmers and not (very much) geeks and thus couldn't care less. They want a system which will do the job - out of the box. They want something easy to setup and configure. And they what answers to their questions on the front page of drupal.org
Plone was a "first mover" in some respects and it is a very powerful framework, so it was chosen by developer/administrators.
Mambo appeals to those who want a cool standard website but don't know about the inner workings of a CMS tool.
Drupal initially was for geeks - but it is maturing and needs to communicate in a new way, and that is why I take part in this discussion at all.
So what I'm (unsuccessfully) trying to say is that, if a (non geek) person interested in setting up a site goes to drupal.org - he will not find as good help as he should.
I just think you were offended by my attitude (sorry about being obnoxious), so I'll stop here before we get into a flame war.
Best
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
Wasn't meant as an attack
I simply stated that you contradicted yourself. That's not an attack.
I agree we should reach out to newbies and try to help them where possible. I just don't think we should use up a big chunk of real estate on the front page to tell newbies about how great Drupal is. There's a much bigger pay off appealing to the leaders, software movers and shakers, and geeks. And these more discerning kinds of people aren't looking for hype, they're looking for solutions that work. Thus, we need to tailor our message more the them. That's all I've ever said.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
By the way, I'm a good example of this
I have built over a dozen Drupal-based sites and I have convinced other web site folks to begin pushing Drupal to their clients, too. I just landed a high visibility client in my field that will surely bring in even more attention to Drupal. By hooking me on Drupal, you've created a micro-avalanche of other Drupal sites.
But your basic newb is going to be running their family blog and photo album. It's would be great if we could successfully make this one person feel at home using Drupal, but it's a lot of effort and doesn't really help the cause of spreading Drupal.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
So am I
I've been pushing Drupal to lots of people for the past three and a half year.
I believe that I was the one who made Marc Canter notice Drupal. At least he aknowledged it at the time. Now he's made Ourmedia.
I also made some noise about Drupal - together with Michael Angeles - in the IA community, so I think that Christina Wodtke had her attention directed towards Drupal partly because of that - and she was a lead person at Yahoo at the time.
Two years ago I talked to Dan Gillmor about it. He did not really pay attention I thougt, but now...
Next week I'll push Drupal to the people on Reboot 7 (www.reboot.dk), and hope to make some progress. Among participants are: Cory Doctorow, Jason Calacanis, Jason Fried, Ben Hammersley, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble and a whole bunch of other good people.
I think it is important to get the attention of the top geeks and the web-celebrities, and I probably agree that it may be too much effort to accomodate every concievable kind of prospective Drupal user.
I just thought that if that was the goal, then drupal.org should do it right.
Word of mouth is the best seller of Drupal. No doubt.
So let's see how we can make the best use of the drupal.org front page real estate, while at the same time pushing Drupal personally...
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
Great point about PUBLICITY
Anyone in business knows that the best advertising is free advertising, and that happens when publications write about you, talk about you, refer to you.
Maybe part of the documentation effort is to put together some basic publicity materials, and refresh them periodically. For example, each and every update should get a press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Drupal releases 4.6.1
Drupal (www.Drupal.org) announced a new release of its Content Management System software today.
[Paragraph about new release's features and fixes]
[Paragraph about what Drupal is]
[Paragraph on modules]
[Website link]
[Publicity contact]
As a matter of fact, I'll look into what the Docs group has in the works in this regard. Maybe I can help out there.
===
Laura
pingV
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
One other thing
Google is a fine example of excellent use of understatement. The devoted their front page to the product not to telling everybody how great they were. Google got popular through word of mouth and that's how Drupal will get popular---not because some copy on the front page persuaded them to check it out.
Because Drupal is on the
Because Drupal is on the fast track in expanding its usefulness for every concievable kind of web2.0 project.
I think you've lost your non-tech users there entirely. Even I don't know what it's supposed to mean ;)
Because Drupal is so incredibly well integrated.
Integrated with what?
You're right
It's much too technical.
I just gave it a fast shot.
The text can improve a lot.
There's much too much too.....
:-)
(the integration I'm hinting at is the thing that i.e. the nukes lack - they have all sorts of duplicated data and functionality in their modules - and one module doesn't know what the other does...)
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
Buzzwords bad, examples
Buzzwords bad, examples good.
http://www.opensourcecms.com provide a test install of Drupal. Perhaps you could link to that, or install your own somewhere? The first thing I look for when visiting the homepage of a CMS is some examples of how it works.
I'd also suggest that you rethink the screenshots of Drupal in the gallery. Currently, you're showing different sections of a site using different themes, which is incredibly confusing. This isn't the place to show off themes, IMO.
demolicious | leafish
Demo and gallery
I think adding a link to the demo is a good idea.
I agree that using different themes to showcase the functionality is confusing. I found it peculiar too when I first saw it. I suggest we add a separate gallery (screenshots) of good looking Drupal sites.
Both should help new users.
can I suggest the following?
As a suggestion...I was thinking what might make more sense would be to do the following with the front page.
in the left hand column, remove the theme garden and instead insert a column of site screenshots...i.e.
====================================
Column header: Sites that use drupal
====================================
Here's a random selection of drupal sites in action:
high traffic portals
------------------
(insert small screenshots and links to 2 high profile portals)
Corporate
-----------
(insert small screenshots and links to 2 high profile sites)
Arts/Grassroots
----------------
(insert small screen shots and links to 2 high profile sites)
moby.com
terminus1235.com
not for profit/misc.
-----------------------
(insert small screen shots and links to 2 high profile sites}
=================================================
That is just a suggestion. While I think the themegarden is great, I think it doesn't sell drupal very well. The default theme in the garden takes a while to load and freezes internet explorer for a few seconds..and might not be as exciting to a newbie as examples of drupal actually in action..
the screenshots and links could be rotated or randomly selected. And don't have to be big screenshots. Just small thumbnail size so it doesn't fill the whole screen.
coming from a music/arts perspective, if I saw a link to moby.com and checked out the terminus site it would blow me away and get me very excited about drupal.
Similarly I would imagine that for portal people, seeing one or two of the big portal examples linked that way would get newbies to drupal excited as well.
Hope that makes sense..and I don't mind helping develop that column if needed.
Dub
DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
I like that idea
I like that idea a lot.
It's doable
It's simple
It will improve communications
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
thanks
Hi Gunnar,
I have an idea to what it might look like, do you want me to take time out to pull together a visualisation/demo?
Or is it straightforward enough?
Dub
DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Suggestions
I share the belief that the front page should not simply be an ad... right now it showcases our active community, which is an asset too.
But there are some problems with the current approach:
- It is not immediately clear what the posts on the front page are. Adding a "Hot Drupal news" header sandwiched between the mission and the first post might help.
- Once you click any of the 3 links in the mission box, you end up in the handbook, and it is not immediately clear how to reach the other two. Perhaps each of them should have a link to the others at the top. But this is a bit tricky as not all pages are in the handbook, and we can't move module-defined pages into the handbook. Does the "book navigation as menu blocks" patch allow this?
- The "About Drupal" handbook section is quite large and stale. With some creative CSS (e.g. punch-out boxes) and some images we could spice it up a lot. I can do the graphics, if others get me the ideas ;).
--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.
Outline?
"But this is a bit tricky as not all pages are in the handbook, and we can't move module-defined pages into the handbook."
Well any node defined by any module can be added to a book via the outline tab - but it can't be placed in more than one book or more than one location.
As for the book navigation as menu blocks - it simply uses the defined book hierarchy to create the menus. The blocks themselves are identicle - the only difference is what part of drupal creates the blocks - so I think the answer to your question is no... or rather - no more so than what is currently available to books.
andre
Is Drupal right for you?
Hi!
Since there are so many questions like "I have a pet shop (or whatever) site and would like to know if Drupal is the right choice for me...", I think there should be a direct link to this handbook page: Is Drupal right for you? which could be expanded. ;-)
Emiliano
http://www.novayork.com
Great idea
I think that one is one REALLY good idea.
This is the kind of info that should have a noticable link on the frontpage.
Everything that can help people make the right decision.
Even if it is that Drupal is NOT right for them.
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
handbook hotlinks
I responded to this on another thread so my apologies if some of you have already seen this....
To distill it to summary here: I believe it would be very helpful if there were links directly to the manual sections for each of USERS, ADMINS, DESIGNERS and DEVELOPERS. By making it clear that there are areas of the handbook that address the concerns for each of these areas, it might help with the RT(F)M aggravations many have.
Then the front page for each section of the handbook can serve as introduction to Drupal, based on what the person is looking for.
Thoughts?
===
Laura
pingV
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet