The Debian Website is now several years old and has grown ever since.
It contains lot of information and documentation. However, more and
more people report that they don't find what they search or reveal
this fact indirectly by asking for information available on the
website on IRC, mailing lists or in personal conversation. (And I
mostly speak of developers here, not of users where the problem might
be even worse, I don't know yet)
I think it should begin a discussion on wether we need to adapt the
website structure and navigation to its current contents to enable
more people to find information and documentation they need.
I plan therefor to invite interested people to meet at debconf and
discuss these topics.
Some sub topics could be:
- how do we want to present subprojects and teams (CDD, Debian Women,
d-i, ...). Some feel that they are hard to find on the page currently
if you don't know where to look
- can we improve the site navigation and contents so that new users
can find what they search (ISOs, CD vendors)
- the same for developers (as there is much more and more diverse
information on developer-related information this is actually the
more difficult task)
- are there parts of the site that need heavy adjustements because of
changes in the project and/or the web technologies in the past
years
I already held a brief talk at FOSDEM[1] about some of these topics and
got quite positive feedback from users and developers (obviously more
the latter at FOSDEM) that there is indeed need of changes. Similar
experiences I got in a few IRC discussions about website topics.
There is still a lack of a thourough discussion on debian-www@l.d.o
on these matters (and I would like also to prepare some ways to get
more feedback before FOSDEM, perhaps some email questionaire or web
form). I wanted to initiate the discussion at the beginning of the
year but got delayed by other jobs (like the release team, etc.) so
this has to happen in the next weeks.
[1] Slides available at: http://www.djpig.de/projekte/debian/talks/webservices/
