[Clipart] new site design in progress

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:
> >> The upload section is large. It seems like that is not useful for
> >> most of our audience. Maybe only one out of 100 would ever submit
> >> anything. Maybe the upload should be on a separate webpage.
> >
> > I'm in two minds on this one.
> >
> > The project is new and we want to attract as many contributions as
> > possible but at some point it makes sense to move this off the front
> > page.  (I've always disliked how some Wiki sites are totally in your
> > face about editing/contributing which makes the site unpleasant to
> > just use).
> 
> I agree with all of that.  But I don't know how soon to pull the
> quicksubmit from the front page.  Maybe when the project hits some
> important milestone?  1000 images?  5000?  10000?

Actually, I'd favor keeping it.  I do understand the point of it not
being useful to a segment of the potential users, however I definitely
do not think it should be hidden.

>From a project perspective, it's important to consider who the
'customers' are.  In a traditional proprietary product-oriented company,
value comes in the form of money from purchasers of the product.  Thus
it's typical to think of customers == users who purchase.  Thus, you
want to optimize to make it easy and worthwhile for users to purchase.

However, in open source projects, things are different.  Value for the
project comes in the form of contributions from users.  This could be
patches for a software project, or new clipart in our case.  Thus,
customers == users who contribute, and we want to optimize to make it
easy and worthwhile for users to contribute.

>From this viewpoint, I would like to see the quick upload tool remain on
the front page permanently, even if it is felt to distract a little from
the browse/download links.  It's worth it.

Now, certainly there's a balance - we don't get users contributing if we
don't have users in general, so we need to also make it reasonably easy
for them to download and get the art.  However, I definitely think we
need to make them very aware that it is easy to submit stuff, and to
communicate that it's their duty to contribute stuff, so that the
project grows and succeeds.  

This is why it is important in wiki-based projects to have the edit link
clear and visible.  If it was available only through a second click,
then this severely cuts down the number of users who become contributors
- they don't even think about editing.  Yes, it adds to the site's
clutter, but for the wiki to work it's critical that it be there and
easy to access.  It takes very few obstacles to turn a potential new
contributor off.

> Something else we should do before we forget:  dynamic pages that do
> computation-intensive or disk-intensive stuff should check the HTTP
> Referer and quickly dish out something static if it's slashdot.  I
> really should make OpenClipart::Web check for this and use its static
> cached copy of shell.php under such conditions.

Yes, I notice the site can be quite slow, due either to the dynamic
nature or perhaps to the hardware, but in any case, whatever we can do
to help ease the load would be worth doing.

Bryce