[OSM-talk] Front page design and SEO

[Dave Stubbs]

2009/3/3 Celso González <celso at mitago.net>:
> On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 09:16:21AM +0100, "Jonas Krückel (John07)" wrote:
>> Ian Dees schrieb:
>> > On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 9:51 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com
>> > <mailto:steve at asklater.com>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >     I asked the CM designers for some quick hacks on what different front
>> >     pages could look like which you can see on the wiki page below. There
>> >     are some very quick ideas there but it's not a full picture by a long
>> >     way.
>> >
>> >
>> >  To get some conversation going:
>> >
>> > I really like the Fp4.jpg[1] example on the URL you gave, Steve. It's
>> > important to make the map (and thus its data) the largest GUI element
>> > on the page. The buttons along the top draw my eye up there to see
>> > what's available. I also like the "Shop" link idea.
>> >
>> > After looking at all of the examples, Fp4.jpg seems to be the one that
>> > is the simplest and most eye-catching.
>> >
>> > [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Image:Fp4.jpg
>> I also like that. Unfortunately i can´t find a link to the wiki :-) I
>> think the wiki is very important and must get a big link.
>
> Yep in fp4 Wiki is missing and we have User diaries, News and Blog. Without entering in
> the opengeodata blog war i think they are similar things
>
>> I also like Fp1.jpg because of the news section. I would change "Edit"
>> to "Edit Map"!
>
> I prefer fp1.
>
> Anyway I think the greatest thing of the new designs is to show the 'Map Legend'
>


You mean like when you click "Map key" on the current front page?

That does bring up a valid point though -- the current page does not
make the map controls obvious. The classic one is when you tell
someone the front page has multiple styles. The little + sign is just
ignored by most people (until you've encountered enough OL sites that
use it... then you just can't help but investigate what layers they're
hiding).

Some of those deigns go with the drop down approach for layer
selection... I keep wanting to scream every time I see it say
"Mapnik".. as if three of the layers there aren't actually rendered
using Mapnik anyway :-)
I can't imagine what a newbie will think a Mapnik is.

Dave