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Fight the wall of text!
Dion Moult has just called for people to help out with fighting the wall of text that is www.kde.org. I just started with ev.kde.org for somewhat the same reasons. The KDE e.V. website explains what the e.V. does. You can find blog items about KDE e.V. here and there — for instance, from Sebas regarding the recent board meeting or the previous meeting in may, or from myself on the november meeting or regarding the -vorstand list or mentioning it in passing around Akademy. And our president, Cornelius Schumacher, wrote a nice what-is-KDE entry in October of this year. Frank and Celeste don’t tend to write about KDE e.V. business as far as I know, but I’m tired of searching right now.
So every now and then we try to explain what KDE e.V. is, what it does, how it’s run and what the KDE community can expect from it and how the KDE e.V. membership can contribute to the success of the association. I often liken KDE e.V. to a city’s amateur soccer association. You can play soccer without being a member, but if you want to support soccer in the city in a general fashion — for instance lobbying to make sure that the city keeps playing fields accessible — then being part of the association becomes important.
Anyway, that kind of stuff needs to be on the KDE e.V. website without being a wall of text.
The KDE e.V. website has an additional challenge right now: it switched its look from the older KDE 4.0 look to the latest "Chihuahua" technology produced by the KDE web-team. It looks much nicer now — even if it is width-limited to 800px. However, navigation has suffered because the e.V. site has a bunch of specific documents that are most useful, together with a deeper tree of stuff.
I have started by adding a "quick links" box to the front page, pointing to specific contact information, members and the most interesting forms and events things. Note that we don’t have a really good setup for the forms and events right now, that’s something to be partly automated and generally improved in the next weeks.
What I’m looking for is people who will go over the e.V. site checking links, double-checking texts, pointing out ambiguities and missing information, suggesting navigation improvements etc. etc. Throw stuff in the comments on this blog or send them to kde-ev-board (in the domain of KDE). Most important though is probably getting some nice graphics for various bits and pieces. I’d like the quick links box to have some cutesy icons (Eugene, this means you!). Some identifying graphics elsewhere as we run into identified needs. Perhaps a little CSS spice here and there.
The KDE www team lives in #kde-www on Freenode, and the KDE e.V. website lives in /home/kde/trunk/www/sites/kde-ev on KDE’s SVN server.
Tags: website