denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
Denise ([staff profile] denise) wrote in [community profile] getting_started2010-05-09 11:48 am

Site tour for new users

So, I figured this would be a good place to start brainstorming :)

I'm in the process of putting together a site tour for new users: a simple overview of what DW is, how it works, what you can do, how you can find interesting things to read, etc.

I have a very vague idea of what it should include, but I haven't yet decided anything about how it should be structured. I thought that before I come up with anything, though, I'd toss it out to y'all and see what you thought, so as to avoid prejudicing the conversation and brainstorming with my ideas.

So:

* Putting yourself into a new user's shoes -- both someone coming from LJ and someone coming to DW from other backgrounds -- what would you expect to see in a "getting started" type site tour?

* How would you expect it to be structured?

* What would be the most effective things to include that would make you say "oh, wow!"

* For those of you who are relatively new, what were the first pieces of information you sought out? What were the most helpful things to know? What were the things that drew you to DW in the first place?
draconic_voices: (Default)

[personal profile] draconic_voices 2010-05-09 05:09 pm (UTC)(link)
The main things that drew me to dreamwidth were the subscribe/access options, the cross-poster, and the ability to import my other journals. So links to the FAQ about these features or even a step-by-step with screencaps run through might be good.

There is also the easy admin console way to recreate your subscriptions on other journals using the "manage_circle" command, provided people kept the same username when the moved over here, however the tutorial that I used to do so when I first moved over here seems to have vanished with a deleted livejournal account. It's not difficult to figure it out if you have any experience using the admin console, but it certainly helped me feel like I was settling in quickly when I suddenly had a reading page full of entries.

One note about importing journals, if you have multiple journals, the importer treats each mirrored entry in a separate journal as a different entry (which it obviously should but it's one of those things that is only obvious after the fact), so if you are importing multiple journals (say you have comments on the mirrored journalfen entry but not on the original livejournal entry) you need to be prepared to do a lot of deleting and wading through older entries if you want to keep only one copy of each entry. Maybe add a note of caution so people know about a potential time suck.

I'd also point people towards the "follow friday" tag which is a great way to find new communities and subscriptions.