History: Outreach

• Question: Do WikiSuite members have personal pages? This might be a good idea to bring a sense of professionalism by having a standard page structure for board members and senior personnel, and maybe allow all members to describe their backgrounds, what they are working on, and why they like WikiSuite.
• I am willing to help implement any of the following recommendations but, being as new as I am, I thought it might be better to discuss the tactical generalities first.

This assessment is going to be rather harsh. Sorry!

• Who is WikiSuite targeting? Is it not:
  1. Business professionals who are learning about possible collaborative tools they might use? ( 8%)
  2. Super-Users whose bosses have asked them to do the same. (20%)
  3. Regular people who are also trying to learn about these tools, and found this site. (70%)
  4. Experienced IT professionals. ( 2%)

In my opinion, our landing page is suffering from geek speak, and we are therefore likely to be losing customers from groups 1-3, and many from 4. The percentage numbers are totally arbitrary, but I'm trying to convey the idea that our site may receive far more visits by valuable prospective customers who currently know almost nothing, than visits by experienced IT people. I am also suggesting the idea that businesses with experienced IT staff, who have absolutely no difficulty understanding our website, may not require our consultations as often as the, far more numerous, less experienced businesses.

Problems and possible fixes

When people visit a web page, there is a satisfaction threshold which must be met for them to remain on that page. They must immediately see clues that they are going in the right direction for their quest, or at least feel they may have discovered an interesting new quest. It is often helpful to ask random people to visit a site and give their impressions.

Problem: The page shows no generally understandable explanation of what WikiSuite is or does

• Probably only 5% of the general public knows what "wiki" means. Possibly as few as 10% of experienced business professionals, and maybe even IT people, really know what a wiki can do. It is admittedly difficult to design a landing page which appeals to everyone, but I think we can do better.
  • The page needs text which explains that wiki software allows groups of people to easily and colllaboratively create attractive documentation pages, and these pages can be either private to an organization or open to the public.
• Very few people know what Open Software is much less FLOSS or "Free / Libre / Open Source software". To them, this is just meaningless jargon.
• The next textual group fails to remedy the problem when it simply says, "WikiSuite™ is especially suited to knowledge-centric organizations". A person really needs to know what an object is before being told what it is useful for.

Problem:

Problem:

Problem: The primary image on the page feels broken

The main image is of the WikiSuite logo surrounded by eight objects that look like they should be hot-links, but they aren't. I bet 9 out of every 10 people who visit this page will move their pointers over those logos, and then be amazed that they don't do anything.
IMO, we really should activate these logos with both textual popups and links.