Re: SEUL: Re: Website redesign

["malonowa" <malonowa@wanadoo.fr>]

It's about putting a human face onto it all instead of the usual highly
technical Linux sites. This is what I suggested about 2 months ago but of
course noone commented.

Laurent and I have been playing with graphics for this - we could come up
with something very cool and jolly but what about the university lot?

This is an interesting design issue since people will have different
expectations from the site depending on where they're coming from.
University lecturers for example have completely different requirements to
primary school teachers and probably quite different tastes. Parents and
primary teachers would come away very impressed with visuals similar to
Disney and the like whereas Lecturers would probably find that irritating.

A few little Java activites for the young ones would be good - good
publicity, good at pulling the punters in.

I'm wondering if it's not worth splitting the site up a bit so that everyone
can access all the info but it would be much quicker for users to access the
info. that's most relevant to them.

I did mention - most heavily - months ago that I'd like to see the site
themed as a "community centre" for tech. people and teachers/parents/kids to
get together and achieve things. With this notion, there's no reason why we
couldn't have a generic entrance with themed zones for primary, secondary,
university, pre-school etc.

I could certainly do a very cool pre-school and primary zone since this is
my profession after all - the artist here's keen on doing that as well.

Roman.

----- Original Message -----
From: <bickiia@earlham.edu>
To: <seul-pub-www@seul.org>
Sent: mardi 28 septembre 1999 03:15
Subject: Re: SEUL: Re: Website redesign


> Howdy.  I'm also interested in helping on the seul/edu (seul-edu or
> seul/edu?) site.  I've spent a good portion of the last month learning
> HTML and stuff, so I feel like using it.
>
> Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net> wrote:
> >finally realized what I had been searching for. What I want is for the
>
> >SEUL web site to be inspirational. A visitor comes away a better
> person.
> >One can be inspired by art, music, etc. Seeing a masterpiece is
> >inspirational. I want the seul site to be a masterpiece.
>
> Ah... great aspirations.  I like the notion of being more than a
> depository for information (though we could really use information as
> well).  The normal alternative being a portal, but portals are cheesy
> and dumb, or at least the word "portal" is.  But maybe if we renamed
> ourselves iSeulEdu we'd be cool.  Anyway, there's not a whole lot to
> port to, so that's really out.
>
> But we can make something a little richer than a straight, utilitarian
> site.  One thing that I think is important is that a lot of newcomers to
> Linux get a utilitarian view of it and miss out on the background and
> motivations behind it.  That's one thing.
>
> Then there's the multitude of details.  Tips, tricks, case studies,
> testimonials.  We could have a page called "tips and tricks", but that's
> not very useful.  It's not organized the way a person *uses* the
> information.  In fact, tips and tricks are never actively used -- they
> sit in the back of the brain until they are useful, or else they solve a
> problem that bugs you until you learn the trick.  But, I'm rambling on
> something that's only vaguely related.
>
> Which is kind of what I like.  One of the best sites I've read through
> is the Portland Pattern Repository/WikiWiki.  The subject of it never
> really caught my imagination very well (it's about programming patterns
> and OO, mostly), but the organization did.  Oh, it's at
> http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
>
> Anyway, it has these deep and rambling organization of pages, created by
> all these different people, with parenthetical thoughts that spin off in
> every which direction.
>
> I don't think that's quite appropriate for seul-edu.  But the
> parenthetical thoughts are good.  Anecdotes and thoughts, maybe.
>
> All of this probably shouldn't be set up in a deeply nested web of
> hyperlinks, but there's other ways to present a bunch of notions at a
> time.
>
> If we can get some pictures of happy kids happily using Linux
> (preferably without that glazed-look that kids get on computers), we can
> randomly insert them in pages (not completely randomly, of course --
> arbitrarily?)  Little things like this.
>
> And we can take other people's content and slap them into the seul-edu
> page.  Not without permission, but HOWTOs and all that are all fair
> game.  But people's bios, selected threads from the mailing list, that
> sort of thing.  I kind of like what Kernel Traffic/Kernel Cousins does
> <http://www.kt.opensrc.org>, summarizing mailing list traffic.  We could
> one-up that -- or maybe it's centralization -- and turn threads into
> real pages, to save ideas for posterity while editting them to be more
> useful than the archives.
>
> Well... what was I getting at again?
>
> I guess that means I'm through with this message.
>
>   -- Ian
>