I don't know if this forwards the discussion or not, but this is a list of questions that I've been collecting as a reference for designing an ed-com website at my College, and plan to eventually include in my FAQ for instructors. This gives me another chance to try it out... I've never quite gotten comfortable with it, please feel free to ignore it or, even better, build upon it.
Who needs to understand the page?
-Who is the audience, are they techies? high school teachers? cyberswarm? students?
What do they need to be able to do?
-Do I want them to fill out a form? Download software? Join the community? Understand a new kind of interaction or philosophy? (particularly important for me as I want my visitors to be able to understand what we're calling the relationship economy, how anyone's success is built upon their ability to connect and share)
How much time will they spend trying to figure it out?
A student who will be assessed on their work and one who has been invited or even found the site by accident, are going to spend different amounts of time learning to navigate and trying to adapt to a new lexicon.
What is their 'screen'/'blog' literacy level?
I think that the section of the population that are using blogs is slowly spreading from the early adopters to the early/middle. If these are the target of the site, then no extra work need be done to introduce these concepts. For middle to late adopters, and those cynical about this type of technology (this can include administrators, students and instructors) the leap to transparency needs to be fairly narrow.
cheers,
dave.
Keywords: audience, CSS, new template
Comments
As well as the elgg.net site we are also designing 3 more completely CSS driven templates for people to choose from or edit. This does present a problem I have not figured out how to resolve. It is easy enough in the Elgg release, we just remove the templates that are there and provide a new suite. However, on this hosted version removing all tables from the code will kill some peoples templates - I need to figure out a way to make sure those that want to stay with their existing table based template can.
Thanks for the reference. These are some of the questions we have been discussing. I went to a really useful conference about open source software and one of the big criticisms was the websites – often people would go to the web site of an open source product and not know what it was all about. I have found it very challenging to put enough information there to satisfy those with more technical knowledge as well as those without. Just enough to get people interested but at the same time not boring them with a long essay about it etc. I have had a couple of really helpful people helping out which has been great.
I think I will document some of the thoughts we have had and add them to your reference – it might be quite useful for others about to embark down this path. Thanks!