[Wikimedia-l] 15% off merchandise today at the Wikimedia Shop

[Tobias]

Hey James,

On 01/14/2013 09:27 PM, James Alexander wrote:
> I generally agree that banners have been overused, they have a big effect
> but a big presence and we don't want to abuse that. I'm really happy to see
> things like Echo being worked on in Engineering which will add a much
> better 'intermediate' choice for messaging which we currently really don't
> have.

I wasn't aware of "Echo" (seems to be a fairly new project). Actually I 
proposed a similar project during the lightning talks 2011 in Haifa. 
Glad to see that WMF finally tackles this issue :)

> The size of the banner was a conscious choice but one I thought about for a
> fair bit. It's what I would generally consider a 'medium' banner but has
> clearly migrated itself to being one of the larger types that we use,
> compared to the past couple years where they tended to be significantly
> bigger (generally mirroring the size of the fundraising banners at the time
> which were significantly larger then this). These ones are around 100px
> which is the size or smaller (depending on the banner) then the fundraising
> banners this year (before they expanded).
>
> For those interested the general idea I was trying to do was to pick a size
> that was the smallest it could be while still getting the information
> across that I thought was important. In general that meant I wanted:
>
>     - Everyone to know that it was a shop banner, I didn't want anyone
>     clicking on it without knowing that's what it was ( or at least as few
>     people as we can).
>     - To know that it was targeted at Editors/Volunteers and that some of
>     the merch was specifically targeted at that.
>     - To know that it was run by the foundation so that people, hopefully,
>     don't think that we've been hacked or that some random shop was doing this.
>     - Be generally readable without effort
>
> I wanted to  more specifically call out on the banner that the profits went
> to the Merchandise Giveaway Program that has been a runaway success but, to
> be honest, I both ran out of space and it's more of a reality for the
> public push because we've cut out almost all of the margin for the logged
> in sale.
>
> I try to support a bunch of different window sizes and resolutions and in
> the end it just didn't seem to work well any smaller then this (but didn't
> have to be any bigger). We still have some issues with the smaller side of
> windows/resolutions and am still looking at good ways to adapt for that but
> are getting there.

Alright, I'm glad you put much thought into this. Hopefully in the 
future we'll have a better tool with Echo that permits less obtrusive 
ways of informing our readers.

Best regards,
Tobias