The Weblog for the AboutUs Wiki

October 15, 2007

Returning and New Readers

Filed under: Community — MarkDilley and TakKendrick

Recently AboutUs started doing something in the vein of Richard K Miller’s post last winter about his Seth Godin inspired plugin which tries to distinguish between new and returning readers to a WordPress weblog. Here is our attempt to help new readers to the AboutUs wiki, heck, really any wiki.

First off, we are in a continuing phase of understanding WhoWeAre and how we exist in this new emergent internet. We realize many of you are discovering wikis and that they initially can be confusing. Hey we are here to help you with that, teach TheWikiWay, and other exciting things about wiki.

To help us explain this, we have set up messages (currently for non-logged in people) at the top of our site, which try to help readers by providing a clearer message.

For example, the message on the AboutUs home page and what folks see when you click around the website:

Another example is the message for people who come to AboutUs via an external site, such as a search engine like Google:

These two sets of messages are an attempt to serve up better messaging based on where you are on AboutUs and how you got here. In that spirit, please check out WhoWeAre and AboutUsTagline for other ideas. If you have any thoughts on possible messages, feel free to add them here: AboutUs PossibleMessages. (until someone follows this FutureLink and creates a page, the link will be red.)

October 15, 2007

Returning and New Readers

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