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

[Bill F]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Austin Che <austin at csail.mit.edu> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>

I'm not pointing this out from a correctness perspective. I have no evidence
to dispute or corroborate your point regarding most people. I'm only me and
even that's hard for me to track on occasion. We can look into this but I'm
wary of making a generalization based upon what I experience.


>
> > 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.
>

I'm not worried about this as a problem as much as I'm pointing this out as
an opportunity missed to acquaint the many visitors to our site with who we
are. One goal I'd think we all share is to get more people to become members
of OWW or to get more people to, based on what we offer, link to us and,
thereby, increase the exposure of the system in the eyes of relevance-ranked
search engines.


>
> > 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 artist. 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.
>

I appreciate your opinion. Maybe you're right. I hope we're not saying that
if we don't connect to a visitor on the specific search term that brought
the user to us, we don't want to encourage them to come back. We sort of
appear to be a bunch of pages to people coming in from Google and not a
specific site.

Take a look at how other online bio communities and web sites handle this.
Compare to information points we can all corroborate. if most other places
don't tell who they are to people coming in from Google, I agree: we don't
need to be concerned. But if we're not currently using good search metrics
to get more people involved in OWW, maybe we can.



>
> --
> Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899
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