About FreeBSD.org visitors

[Allan Jude]

On 2013-10-10 19:25, Derek Wood wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 11:14:48AM -0400, Eitan Adler wrote:
>> Here is an overview of the people that visit FreeBSD.org:
>> http://people.freebsd.org/~eadler/files/Report-10.01.pdf
>>
>> Some takeaways:
>>
>> - More than half (60%) the people that come to our website leave
>> without going to another page (called 'bouncing').  However these
>> users spend more time than any other user per page.
>> - Non-bouncing users had an average of just over 4 pages per session
>> but spent about an average of 0.86/s per page.  They spend most of
>> their time on the last page.
>>
>> From these I think we can take away that most people come looking for
>> something very specific.
>> How can we fix this? Better search maybe?  Improved navigation bar?
>> Its up to you to work on this.
>>
>> - New users spend a lot *less* time on the site than repeat visitors.
>>
>> Do we need better advocacy data?  Less text to confuse new users?  Is
>> this trend specific to FreeBSD or is it true across the board?
>>
>> - Internet Explorer is 10% of our traffic.
>>
>> Many of ours users use Windows as there primary desktop platform.
>> Probably more if we include not-IE on Windows.
>>
>> What other insights do you see?
>> What other data might be helpful for us?
>>
>> -- 
>> Eitan Adler
>> _______________________________________________
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> The bounces I would be most concerned about are the ones from
> index.html, because I wouldn't call anything there useful (e.g, no
> direct links to a FreeBSD iso)
I did manage to get them to change the text of the link that leads to
the ISOs to contain the word 'Download', that is a start

> A few ideas:
>
> - Offer prebuilt FreeBSD VMs
>
> - A link to a screenshots page? This might be tacky but I believe that
>   most potential users view FreeBSD as solely a console-based system,
>   so showing what the user can do with the different desktop
>   environments available in ports can help dispel this.
>
> - Update the information blurb below "The FreeBSD Project":
>
>     * Stress that chances are, whatever software you expect on a *nix
>       system is available in ports
I recently edited that blurb a little bit, the header originally read
'Based on BSD UNIX', which was mostly irrelevant. I stuck with the
spirit of the original message, just shorted it a bit and added a node
to some of our newer features


>     * Ease of installation: bsdinstall is new; maybe link screenshots
>       of it or the section in the handbook that covers installation
>       with bsdinstall.
This has been done for a while:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/using-bsdinstall.html

>     * Link to PC-BSD: I'm not sure this is feasible, but the
>       desktop-friendly features (graphical installer, WM included,
>       default applications included) would definitely be more
>       appealing to newcomers.
>
> Although, I do agree: there isn't a whole lot of data, and if users
> are moving on from the site after just the front page, there isn't a
> whole lot we can do. Fedora [1] and Ubuntu [2] seem to be designed on
> requiring at least a little bit of user curiousity: They contain
> mostly the same things the freebsd.org site has, and then have a
> well-designed "features" page that shows off the applications included
> with the OS and also the general look and feel.
>
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/en/features/
> [2] http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop
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-- 
Allan Jude