On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 21:19 +0100, Hannes Hauswedell wrote:
- Moving text to "about"
Which text?
Most of the text on the front page actually. My suggestion is to move all "propaganda" (which would probably be the three first paragraphs and the FSFE-links) to a separate about-page. This will make the front page less terrifying for luddites, and it would create an appearance of the site as "an helpful overview of PDF-readers" rather than "a pr-stunt for FSFE". (Note that I'm not suggesting pdfreaders.org is a pr-stunt, but I'm quite sure many people will read it that way.)
I am against (re)moving any of the text. The whole point of pdfreaders.org is increasing visibility of Free Software and informing about Software Freedom as an ethical issue. We can discuss whether the text meets these criteria, but I am decidedly *against* making pdfreaders a mere download-portal (which it would be with the text moved to "about").
I agree with your basic premise that promotion of Free Software is the ultimate goal, but believe that this goal is often better served by not putting the message in focus. The best promotion campains are the ones that doesn't look like promotion campains, so yes, my suggestion is to have pdfreaders.org *appear* like a download-portal, albeit a rather unique one. For one thing, I suspect many businesses and organisations will be reluctant to link to the page as it is now because they don't want to scare their customers/potential members with text they "might not understand". Of course, there should still be an explaining text on the front page, but limiting it to the paragraph before and the one after the download table will make it easier for many people and organisations to make use of it. If we want the page to be linked to by those that aren't already supporters of Free Software, we need to make that message *appear* secondary. If we do that, and have the explaining text on the about page instead, we will probably be able to recruit many more to the cause than we could with the present pages.
all the best, /Stian