www.squeak.org finally updated

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Mon Jul 4 12:40:28 UTC 2005


Hi Stef -

> andreas this is not what adrian was seeing.
> What do you gain playing the devil advocate.

In a way I am but only because you made a major point of a company not 
linking to or mentioning Squeak.org because of a) the general look of 
the site and b) the content on the site. While a) might be fixable for 
most of the audience b) certainly isn't. By deciding what we choose to 
present on the website we will attract a certain audience. Choosing a 
purely business oriented presentation will certainly attract the 
business kind of guy and (almost) certainly alienate the 
media/fun/education kind of visitor. And quite possibly vice versa and 
that's the essence of the question: Should we go broad, and risk that 
some companies don't link to/mention Squeak.org because they feel it's 
too risky or should we go narrow, catering to some particular subgroup 
(which doesn't have to be business) instead? You seemed to make a point 
of that the website should be done in a way that some companies link to 
it - I just called this into question since I think the website of the 
Squeak.org community needs to be broader than that.

OTOH, a project (such as Seaside) might provide their own presentation 
and I think it's perfectly fine for a particular entity (company or 
otherwise) to link to that project instead of Squeak. This is 
commonplace in many other communities and environments and I don't see 
why Squeak.org would have to subsume all of these individual projects.

The bottom line here is that I think we shouldn't be scared of some 
company/project saying "I'll rather link to Seaside/wxSqueak instead of 
Squeak.org because it has a more business-oriented look and feel" I 
think that's *good* since it allows Squeak.org to remain relatively 
broadly focused.

> Not realizing that the web site is bad even for attracting new guys  
> wanting to play with squeak is doom.

All right, I'll drop out after this post since I really don't care that 
much about the look of the site - I'm caring much more about what's on 
it. But I'll stick to the point that right now there's just absolutely 
nothing "special" about the new site, nothing that would anyone cause to 
stop and take notice. It's because of this very fact that I object 
calling the current site "crappy" or "bad" - there ain't much but at 
least there is a little to say "hm... might be interesting". I think 
that to attract new users this is vastly more important than the 
slickest look of the site.

And yes, there *are* absolutely good things on the new website. They 
just need to be expanded into something that provides (at least) a 
similar amount of depth of information that we had on the old site. For 
example, it would be tremendously helpful if we wouldn't just link to 
"free Smalltalk books" but rather try to give people some help in which 
ones might be best - after all there are significant differences in 
whether the book is even applicable to Squeak, whether it teaches the 
language or particular libraries etc.

> Squeak is a difficult product to market but at least we should try.
> I will ask to some designers in the fall to propose some new webpage  
> for squeak-brand and we will see.

Stef, this is not about the look this is about content that I'm talking 
about. I'm entirely fine with this look (or any other actually) as long 
as the content is there. But right now it feels like we've taken the 
little we had up at Squeak.org put it into a single page ("about") and 
filled up all of the other pages with (very few) external links.

> Because may be squeak.org is dead anyway.

Only once we start ignoring the contents for the looks of the site.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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