Improve the top of the newsletter

[chriscool]

Improve the top of the newsletter

[tfnico]

Thanks for bringing this up. I'm pretty sure that the more we shove the signup form in the user's face, the more signups we will get. From what I hear and read about website UX these days, it's the winner way to get returning traffic. Most people don't subscribe to RSS anymore, and most people will spend less than a few seconds browsing the page before moving on. A very visible sign-up form could help a lot.

Of course, we should have a nice sign-up form on the about page too. We can start with this, and then play around with the templates to see what it would look like in the header of an edition.

[chriscool]

@tfnico I agree that having the signup form in the user face might be a good thing to get a lot of traffic fast. But I think in the long run it is better to make the top as less anoying as possible for the reader and that means that we should put more content and less meta content at the top.

For example if you look at LWN.net, except the menu, you will see only the following about LWN itself:

What is LWN.net?
LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within
the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information,
and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities. 

If you look at for example http://www.washingtonpost.com/, http://time.com/, http://www.nytimes.com/ or http://www.lemonde.fr/ you will not see much meta content, except on the nytimes that has a lot of subscribe advertising on it but no other advertising.

As I think a signup form is a bit anoying, my opinion is that it is better to do as LWN does and have a few lines with some links, one or more of these links being subscribe links.

[tfnico]

@chriscool OK, how about a signup form at the bottom of each edition?

[chriscool]

@tfnico ok with a signup at the bottom. Can you take care of it?
I will rework the top as I suggested above, but I am still open to suggestions about it.

[tfnico]

@chriscool Yup, but I think my top prio is to fix #45 and add some #57 first.

[chriscool]

@tfnico ok no problem.
I created issue #60 to add a signup form at the bottom.

I close this as the following commits took care of this issue:

a049cc7
6cb3f8c
22e9739
a20d18e