Send "Do I qualify?" clicks to the office website

[erickhun]

This is quite a biggie change. The Do I qualify? link is the most clicked link on the community website. The office I believe maintains the qualification check up to date?

The indirect advantage (for the office) is that they will probably rank better for more Google search requests.
I do believe it's a good thing to try to "rank" lower on purpose. I always thought it was weird to rank better than the "official" website and confuse even more applicants that are looking for official/updated information

What do everyone @taiwangoldcard/tech thinks?

related to #197

cc @jliao-tw

[jliao-tw]

Thanks for the tag Eric. Of course we would like to eventually be higher in ranking, but I see it as a challenge to get there organically lol.

As the policies get tweaked, the wizard will probably need occasional tweaking, which we will be updating first. In which case it would make sense to just have one wizard out there. I'm okay giving @fifieldt the final say though, since he put in the most work on it.

Edit: seems like Tom talked about this previously? I have not been keeping up on the other threads.

[fifieldt]

Thanks Eric, for open and honest communication on this potentially contentious change :)

My personal position is that this isn't a zero-sum game: as long as applicants can find the right information when they need it, the program overall is a success. I believe that the community is an important part of the Gold Card program, and is well placed to provide information that the official sources cannot, or don't, or don't provide quickly enough.

To date, I think taiwangoldcard.com has done an amazing job of this - particularly in terms of accuracy: the information has been updated in a timely manner. The community is also sufficiently healthy that there is no reason this won't continue to be the case :)

One thing I have personally learned about the Gold Card program is that context is quite important when a prospective applicant is learning. Send them straight to the application portal and they give up, such is its lack of context about what is actually required for application. Give them a chat bot visible first thing on the homepage and they will ask questions that won't necessarily help them get through, because they don't yet understand the complications of the qualification process. In the User Experience testing for goldcard.nat.gov.tw we received a lot of feedback about dense and confusing information, which resulted in the step-by-step 'guide' approach you see starting after the qualification check at https://goldcard.nat.gov.tw/en/apply/step-2/

So, I think the question is: what is the best pathway for a prospective applicant? Does the content at the other end of the external link provide enough context for them to continue down the path and eventually make an application; or would they benefit from seeing an additional paragraph before visiting the finder? @marktrang in #188 had some thoughts on this. Personally, I can see it either way, which I know doesn't help :) I proposed #197 to give the most possible respect for our community website and follow Mark's suggestion, but I am also OK with this patch #198 :)

Regardless, I would appreciate if we make a decision on this before ~June. Due to my national service, I may lose the ability to maintain the server hosting visafinder.tw for an extended period.

[erickhun]

Shall we merge @cbrolly @taiwangoldcard/tech @pqvst @johncliu @iansinnott @geekyme @matrinox ?

[erickhun]

I'm going ahead and merge this one.