|
|
|
|
For our purposes, the web site means web pages devoted to helping people participate in the project as developers, documenters, etc. Note that this may be different from the main user-facing web site. In many projects, users have different needs and often (statistically speaking) a different mentality from the developers. The kinds of web pages most helpful to users are not always the same as those helpful for developers. Don't try to make a "one size fits all" web site just to save some writing and maintenance effort: you'll end up with a site that is not quite right for either audience. The two types of sites should cross-link, of course, and in particular it's important that the user-oriented site have, tucked a way in a corner somewhere, a clear link to the developers' site, since most new developers will start out at the user-facing pages and look for a path from there to the developers' area.
An example may make this clearer. If you were a user wanting to download and install LibreOffice, you'd start there, go straight to the "Download" link, and so on. LibreOffice, like other large projects, has a few different gateways to developer-land. There's a prominent link partway down the page that says "Get Involved", and at the top there's also a dropdown menu named "Improve It" that offers a number of paths to participation, including a "Developers" item. The "Get Involved" page is aimed at the broadest possible range of potential contributors: developers, yes, but also documenters, quality-assurance testers, marketing helpers, web infrastructure experts, financial or in-kind donors, interface designers, support forum helpers, etc. This frees up the "Developers" page to target the rather narrower audience of programmers interested in improving the LibreOffice code. The set of links and short descriptions provided on both pages is admirably clear and concise: you can tell immediately from looking whether you're in the right place for what you want do, and if so what the next thing to click on is.
This division into two contributor-facing gateways, one for all kinds of contributions and another for coders specifically, is probably right for a large, multi-faceted project like LibreOffice. You'll have to use your judgement as to whether that kind of subdivision is appropriate for your project; at least at the beginning, it probably isn't. It's better to start with one unified contributor gateway, aimed at all the types of contributors you expect, and if that page ever gets large enough or complex enough to feel unwieldy - listen carefully for complaints about it, since you and other long-time participants will be naturally desensitized to weaknesses in introductory pages! From a technical point of view there is not much to say about setting up the project web site. Web hosting is easy to come by, and most of the important things to say about layout and arrangement were covered in the previous chapter.
The web site's main function is to present a clear and welcoming overview of the project, and to bind together the various collaboration tools (the version control system, bug tracker, etc.). To save time and effort, many projects just use one of the canned hosting services, as described below. A canned hosting site is an online service that offers some or all of the online collaboration tools needed to run a free software project. For many projects, canned hosting provides a perfectly adequate developer-oriented entry point to the project, and there is no need to set up a separate web site. There are two main advantages to using a canned site. The first is server maintenance: uptime monitoring, operating system upgrades, etc. Having someone else handle that is one less thing to worry about. The second advantage is simplicity. They have already chosen a bug tracker, a version control system, perhaps discussion forum software, and everything else you need to run a project.
|
|
