Over the years, the philosophy of open source has become widely applied in many industries, including computer and Web technologies. The open source model is based on peer collaboration resulting in the end-product and the source-material available at no cost to the public.
Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. (Wikipedia)
No wonder that the principles of low-cost development, better quality due to the power of distributed peer review and general availability make the concept of open source very popular. This market is quite easy to enter, so along with such open-source giants as Linux, GNU and Mozilla, there are hundreds of smaller projects delivering free software and tools to the community.
While developing your own open source project it’s critical to cover the cause online, so creating an informative and interactive website is one of the most important tasks.This post covers some best practices of open source website design. Let’s take a look at the sites of globally renowned open source projects and define what features and sections should be included on a website of this type.
Information Clarity
The message of any website should be clear, and especially so on open source project websites. Make the cause of your project immediately apparent by including short descriptions and download links on the main page. Don’t take for granted what visitors already know about your mission and be sure to give them a short overview of your organization and services you offer. Also, be sure to inform users whether you use any public license for your software, legal statement should be easy to find on the site.
Prominent links to support and help documentation
The website of an open source project should provide comprehensive help documentation to the users. It’s crucial to make the information database easy to search and to browse.
Connect the users of your product
Any open source initiative is all about peer-to-peer collaboration and community discussion. Connecting people around your product and enabling them to review and improve it together is the prior task. Assign some space on your website for users to talk and help each other. Don’t forget to inform them about the organization and terms of use of community portal.
Let users know how they can participate
Provide a simple and straight-forward process for people to get involved in your open source project. Give a precise explanation of the contribution process (cover such aspects as level of technical skills required from a contributor, the structure of development team and other useful info for current and potential contributors). Your website should highlight that any help is welcome – make sure that non-professional end users of your product have a way to take part in it too (donations, shops, volunteer work etc).
Bug Report Section
Open source websites are always at the public testing stage. Timely revelation of errors and usage issues helps the open source product improve and evolve fast. The absence of an apparent and easy way to report about bugs and problems may lead to catastrophe. Don’t let this happen by including a prominent Bug Report section to your website.
Make your site media-friendly
Use your website to spread the word about your open source project: include something like media or press kit on the site, so that bloggers, news companies and journalists could easily find info about you and send their audience your way.
Set a blog and news feed
Including a news section and blog to your website you increase chances of visitors coming back to the site. It’s another great way to build connections and credibility for your open source initiative. People interested in the product you offer might like to get updated about news and events concerning it. Besides, blog entries can be reposted by other blogs which increases the exposure of your site, and of course, the project itself in the media.
Showcase of well-design websites belonging to popular open source projects
The Apache Software Foundation
Remember that you can implement the very best practices of the open source project website design getting a flash template or a jQuery template at FlashMint.
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