Re: APL is Alive +ACY- Well V/S APL Needs to learn

> Don't understand me wrong. I know the effort a decent website demands.
> It's fine from an APL-er's point of view. I'm trying to look from a
> +ACI-random+ACI- person's view. Keep in mind there are at least 8 or 9 billion
> websites. It's not to discourage you, but I don't think it's an
> incentive for people in general to get interested in APL. Look at APL
> Wiki's home page. How would people arrive there? I don't see any term on
> it by which people would hit APL Wiki, except in case they would type
> +ACI-APL Wiki+ACI- in Google....

The Wiki is not a marketing tool designed to attract people not
already interested in APL. It is a technical platform dedicated to a
particular theme: APL. It is going to be what the community is making
out of it. That is not necessarily what you want, or what I want, but
that's the way it is.

>...Filling out terms in +ACI-META Keywords+ACI- is useless.
That's why we don't use them.

The Wiki _might_ attract people who started to be curious about APL.
What are they going to do? Some possible scenarios I can think of:

1. Type "APL in 20 minutes" into Google. Right now the Wiki is third
on the result page list. Not bad at all.
2. They might look at the Wikipedia for APL. They will find a link to
the Wiki there. It takes three characters and two clicks.
3. They might expect a wiki to be there, because nowadays a
programming language community is supposed to have a wiki. So they
will enter "APL wiki" in Google.

All that works fine. Great. Entering "APL" doe not work, thanks to the
Applied Physical Labs and also to the newly introduced "Agile Project
Leader" qualification put in place by the Agile community recently.
Not much that can be done about this.

> Some consolation: 80+ACU- of all websites are designed that way. Very
> clumsy.
> My experience: let it look nice (example Dyalog's), attractive,
> appealing. This will need some creative dexterity. Put some effort in

Agreed. Unfortunatley neither "attractive" nor "appealing" are clearly
defined terms. Worse: what is appealing to some might be ugly to
others. I am certainly not going to discuss this. It is wasted time.

> navigation - very important+ACE- Look how big companies are setting up
> their sites. Without exception they have their pages divided in three
> parts: left for navigation, middle for main information and a right pane
> for allusive information.

This is a _Wiki_, not a corporate website. All Wikis follow the same
approach which is very different from corporate websites, and for good
reasons. Invest more than 2 seconds and you might be able to figure
out what the difference is between a corporate website and a wiki.

> Then, have sufficient keywords, incidental and explicit, on your home
> (front) page, preferable in large size. Change texts on your home page
> from time to time - the least ones will be noticed by Google's crawler
> and the more they frequents the earlier they will be indexed and
> recognized as +ACI-interesting+ACI-.

The size of the keywords does not have any impact at all on the
"searchability". Being marked as H1/H2/H3 _has_ an impact. Same is
true for the _position_ of text in a wiki. The first 25% of text are
much more important than the rest.

Changing the home page only to improve it's rank is no a good idea,
and it's not going to work. However, it _is_ important how frequently
pages belonging to that domain are updated/added. That has a direct
impact on the ranking of any of the pages. It is up to the community
to improve that.

Furthermore, there is always a conflict between marketing goals and
usability. For a Wiki, usabilty is certainly more important. It does
not make sense to attract more people by focusing on the marketing
goal only to make sure that they are going elsewehre after 2 seconds
because of usabilty problems.

The easiest way to improve the Wikis ranking is by adding content and
getting more links from other Web sites. A special search on this
points out that the APL Wiki got links from:

- Wikipedia
- Vector
- APL FAQ's
- APL Germany

(Links from newsgroups and semi-search engines are ignored)

That's not exactly good but it is not bad either. And it is not in my
power to change that.

Kai