[OWW-Discuss] OpenWetWare.org: identity problem/identity feature?

[Bill F]

A large part of all of OWW's traffic comes from referrals from either Google
or Yahoo. That means a user sees a small tag on the search result line prior
to clicking on it that identifies the page as part of OWW.

Once they click on the link to go to OWW, Barry pointed out that when they
land on one of our pages other than Main_Page or one of a dozen or fewer
other pages, there's nothing on the top of the page or in the sidebar to
identify the site. We become anonymous. The viewer has to scroll to the
bottom of the page to find a small link for "about openwetware.org".

Our first attempt to address the problem will go online soon. We're adding a
one-time display of the text from the OWW main page telling users who we are
and inviting them to join. Once they have a cookie from our site, they will
never see it again. If they visit once and see a link that's not relevant to
them, the nxt time they visit and get wowed by our info, they may not
connect the fact they found value at OWW and thus fail to look around on the
site.

Does anyone have any thoughts about other ways to address this? Even in UMS,
every page has a banner identifying the site as OWW.

We can add a banner to the skin over the white area of the page. This banner
would not ever be displayed on hosted lab's sites since the dewikify app
doesn't export the skins. I'm no artists. If anyone has a simple and clear
way to express who we are to visitors in an unobtrusive but clear way, I'd
love to hear about it.

Thanks!

B.
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