Analytics

[MikelSalazar]

If we use a Single Page website design and do not need to include a user registration, it doesn't make much sense to use a complex analytics solution to track the users. Plus, we don't have to worry about the GDPR law or those damn cookie messages. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to include a small, server-side system to store statistics about the visitors.

[cperey]

I would like to have a counter for number of visitors implemented so that we can see if/when there is any response to outreach campaigns

[janerivi]

Don't go for single page for the whole thing! Split it up in a normal conventional landing page and maybe a couple of other pages with conventional easilly accesible content and then separate out a propere spatial experience based on on the sandbox work. On the topic of analytics I don't belive we need massive analytics. A simple counter function would propbably suffice :)

[MikelSalazar]

I really believe that having a good single-page experience is of critical importance. It doesn't need to contain everything in every section, but it should provide a good, seamless interface to understand the different sections and then, if you want more detail, you can enter a dedicated page.

Nowadays, having to wait for another page to load can be a deal breaker for many users. Call it lazyness if you want, but people have been conditioned to have very responsive experiences (see the UIs of game consoles or apps like Netflix) and if you separate the different sections into several pages without presenting each one (like in openarcloud.org/), most users are not going to click beyond the second one.

[janerivi]

I share the sentiment that we should not keep our users waiting for content. And a traditional static webpage with a couple of images some css and text loads very quickly from a normal webserver today (small fraction of a second for text to be available for a user). Most of the pages that loads slowly does so because they have tons of javascript or because they are generated on the fly from a complicated and slow serversside CMS system like Wordpress. We don't need to put our text and image content into a database backend, just on a static webserver host. The OpenARCloud site runs on squarespace wich is far from my preferred platform, it just happened to have e-commerce to allow for collecting member fees. I maintain my advice that we should go for lightinig quick static webpages for the landing page and maybe a couple of other pages for static content and then separate out the experience and make that a SPA as it needs javascript and obviously benefits from being loaded once and implement content cacheing and offline support. For the landing page pure static html, css suffices

[MikelSalazar]

Ah... Do not worry. I was talking about using mainly HTML & CSS (with some elements requiring a bit of Javascript to improve the user interaction, but nothing that would force the visitors to make use of it). I'm working on a prototype using the OpenARCloud site as a base, so you can see what I mean.

[MikelSalazar]

I have yet to receive feedback for Alina, but in response to @janerivi previous comment, here is a link to the redesign I made of the OpenARCloud website, to better convey what I mean in regards to creating a Single Page Website. https://mikelsalazar.com/projects/openarcloud/index.html

Basically, it is taking advantage of the new features of HTML5 and CSS (without requiring any JavaScript) to create a "pitch deck" rather than multiple text documents that are harder for the users to read and for me to incorporate in the WebXR version. Of course, we can create additional pages/documents/media with more information, but I believe the first thing that the visitors see when accessing our website should give them a good overview of the working group rather than asking them to have to go through multiple walls of texts to even understand what the project is about.