I think this
is a great discussion. J To add to
this maybe
we should also discuss the objectives of the site. As you mentioned,
we don’t
have anything to convert but I see the site providing the following
objectives
(not in order):
- Make it easy for our
community to access the different Eclipse project technology.
- Be an information source
on how to use the project technology.
- Promote the wider Eclipse
ecosystem and be a value for our Eclipse member organizations.
- Provide the
infrastructure to support the Eclipse projects.
In addition
to some of your ideas, I would
suggest we could also measure.
- Number of unique users to
our site (new and returning users). We want to encourage returning
users.
- Length of time they spend
on the site - Longer means they are getting the useful information or
they are struggling to find stuff . This might be dependant on the
pages they are visiting. For instance, if they go to the download page
it should be quick. If they go to project pages (ie they are looking
for information) they it might be longer. We might want to think of use
cases for this.
- Number of pages
visited.
- Overall satisfaction with
the site (yes we don’t measure conversions but I would hope the goal of
the site is to be a useful information source.)
Phoenix-oids,
As many of you know, I think our website could be much much better
(that's the
"safe for the public version of my opinion" :-) As I've been
thinking about what needs to be done, I realize that we don't have a
clear
definition of what a "good Eclipse website" does for the community,
ecosystem, and the Foundation. In commercial website land, they measure
conversion:
the
converting of a visitor into a sale. Given that the Eclipse Foundation
doesn't sell anything,
what should we measure -
our conversion if you will - to verify that our website is doing a good
job for
the ecosystem?
An obvious thing to measure is downloads, but that's too narrow for
what we are
trying to accomplish, but it's definitely one aspect of our
"conversion" number. Additionally, we could measure
click-through to member companies. And we could include downloads of articles,
live events, clicks to plug-in-central
downloads,
clicks that end up at mailing list or newsgroup archives, ... and (of
course)
when we have EclipseCon or Eclipse Summit Europe active, we can measure
conversion to registrations there.
Do you all have additional ideas about what we should be measuring as
"success" for the Eclipse websites?
- Bjorn
