Amberjack opens up the site tour to non-geeks

One of the challenges of launching a new community or social networking site — or introducing new users to an existing site of more-than-modest complexity — is turning people on to the various features and areas. Any community site owner can rattle off a dozen "How do I — ?" questions that came flooding in to them in the first days and weeks of a public launch. (Even worse are the expected questions nobody is asking, because nobody has discovered that cool new widget or feature that apprently is languishing in obscurity.)

Ideally, good design can avoid the more obvious questions like, "How do I sign up?" But even the best-designed social networking site or online community is going to need some sort of introduction to its (hopefully) rich features. After all, new tools, ideas, widgets and usage trends are emerging every day, to the point that new sites almost always reach into feature areas that, for many, if not most, users were until that point largely unknown.

The flip side is that these days even 1-year-old sites and software can seem almost stale. People have come to expect almost any new community or "social networking" (which itself is a relatively new buzz phrase that reflects features that largely did not exist not all that long ago) site is going to offer new frontiers to explore, be they the as-yet-unknown features mentioned above, more common features offered in new ways, or both offered to existing online communities that have been under-served. As someone who develops Drupal-powered sites, which almost always embody myriad powerful features, I can say that, from my experience, this is a challenge that arises with almost every website launch.

The catch-all solution for the challenge of introducing a new site and/or new features to new and prospective community members is the site tour.

Creating a good site tour is always an editorial challenge. The site administration team has to come up with a good, clear, instructive, and hopefully entertaining (or at least certainly not boring) introduction to the site. Usually that consists of your basic page of text with a few graphics. More ambitious or resource-flush groups might produce a video or flash animation that gives an animated presentation. (My own personal bias is to largely avoid these presentations, as they almost always are boring, they almost always take a lot of time to plow through, and they almost always instruct by emulating reality, without any chance for folks to actually do anything — and there's no topping learning by doing.)

Enter Amberjack, a new open source JavaScript library that makes it incredibly easy to create site tours that walk users through the actual site. Licensed LGPL, with a fabulous online wizard that even a Luddite could appreciate, Amberjack is a way to create annotated site tours on actual site pages.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this quick site tour.