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

[Austin Che]

> 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".

    I think people are familiar enough with looking at the url in
    their browser to know what site they're on. Also, the title of
    every page clearly includes OpenWetWare. Every browser I know
    includes this as part of the browser window title.
    
> 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.

    This seems like a nice idea to try.
    
> Does anyone have any thoughts about other ways to address this? Even in UMS,
> every page has a banner identifying the site as OWW.

    I don't think this is a problem. 
    
> 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.

    I don't think we should waste screen space for banners advertising
    who we are. Anyone who cares (i.e. if there's useful content and
    they're looking for more) will have no problem finding the main
    page.
    
-- 
Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899