Greendogo wrote:
Does anyone else think that the main index page for http://www.openmw.com needs to be an actual non-wiki "Main Page" with news and various links to the different parts of the site (this includes the wiki and forums)? In addition, the old parchment style background and OpenMW logo was pretty attractive. Shouldn't we make a "real" main page and salvage the old parchment theme for it?
Vance987 wrote:
Yes, but "real" web pages cost money. There was one until now. Lordrea hosted the website for the time allotted. From my experiences, the only free way to have a website you're talking about is to actually own a server, and keep it online all day/night. Correct me if I'm wrong.
pogzy wrote:
The main page could be the wiki main page if it contains all pages that visitors usually see on main pages:
Download section,
Official announcements preferred to News section, because there should be news on a news section, and it is difficult to maintain a constant stream of news.
Project description that could be in the main page (What is OpenMW),
etc. in fact all the pages or their equivalent that was on the old web site
All these pages are easy to copy paste to the wiki, anybody can do it.
The style of the old web site is nice, quite different to the default one of this forum but it should be ease to take css, images, background etc and adapt the new wiki to the style of the old site. But a direct access to the wiki is needed, to upload css/images etc.
The nice thing about the wiki is the easy to edit it without the need to do ftp access and html encoding. Lot's of people can write things on a wiki (think about Wikipedia), very few can do nice html pages.
Some work should be done on the content of the wiki to have the content of the web stage, and to the style.
I think the current situation is not the best one, there should be only one web site, only one source repo etc. It should be better to do a quick & dirty copy paste to the wiki and to remove the old web site and the svn repo on sourceforge, I think that people will think that this project is not very active if they look at svn.
Lordrea wrote:
I agree with pogzy, the wiki should work out just fine for us. The main_page entry just needs to be modified to serve as a better 'portal' for the project. Next weekend I have a larger span of free time that I will spend asking for things to change. If someone wants to keep tabs on posts for me, and have them prepared for a nice bulleted "this is what we need, this is what people voted on", I'd be a happy man.
Vance987 wrote:Yes, but "real" web pages cost money. There was one until now. Lordrea hosted the website for the time allotted. From my experiences, the only free way to have a website you're talking about is to actually own a server, and keep it online all day/night. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I own this server (or rather, share it). I have the space, the databases, and the bandwidth - anything that uses the large array of software allowed by my host would do. I'm also a web developer in the real world, so throwing web pages up for a project isn't an issue.
Greendogo wrote:
Has anyone ever told you how awesome you are?
Anyway, anything we can do to make the first page you see when going to "www.openmw.com" look more like a main page, displaying news and links to the forums, a link to the wiki (even if the main page is really the wiki), and the google groups and svn/download section would be a vast improvement.
Currently, I think the biggest issue is organization and theme. The first page, even if it is technically a wiki or whatever shouldn't look like a wiki. It should function like the main hub of a vaster website. It should also not be editable to people like me. I think Lordrea and Nicolay (and a select other few) should be the only ones to have that privilege.
