Making Debian users more visible

[Silvia Frank <silvia.c.frank@web.de>]

Hello Debian website team,

on the Debian publicity list we discussed how we can make Debian deployments more visible. What do you think about following suggestions concerning https://www.debian.org/users/ ?:

Oh great, I never notice this page on the Debian website until now. 
Maybe we could make a link from the frontpage to the "user site"? Is it 
possible to highlight the freshest or outstanding deployments, e.g. in a 
box at the right side beside the list? The list of deployments is very 
long and some of the entries seem very old, and I think visitors are 
more motivated to click, if they can see, which are the latest.

Highlighting the user testimonials on the front page sounds like an
interesting idea. Unfortunately there is no machine-readable date
information in users section of the webwml CVS repository, so the
highlighting would need to be manual and we can't automatically sort by
date until that is fixed. Probably the highlighting would need to be
manual anyway? Could you make a mockup of how it might look? This topic
should be discussed on the debian-www list anyways.

https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/users/
https://www.debian.org/devel/website/
https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/

Ah ok, this makes even small changes intricate. So maybe for the first it is the easiest to put at the start site a link "Debian deployments" or "Debian users" which goes to:

https://www.debian.org/users/ . The link could be in the first column of links:
About
Social Contract
Code of Conduct
Free Software
Partners
Users
Donations
Contact Us

And on https://www.debian.org/users/ we integrate at the right side a simple box, where we put in newest and outstanding deployments. Attached you find a very simple (pdf/ libre office-)draft, how it could look. The background colour of the box should be the same blue as on top of the side behind the Debian logo. I also shorten a bit the intro (also because the entries are not listed alphabetically  :-) - what do you think?

I know a lot of time has been spent on the website over the years. But anyway, I think in a longterm perspective it would make a lot of things much easier and faster (and "up-to-date-looking" ;-)), if the Debian website would be based on a CMS like Typo3 or Drupal. Maybe we should give this a thought ;-)?

Cheers,
Silvia.

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