7:46 p.m.
Hi Garrett,
I love the new design - it's clean, and addresses most of the reasons
we've identified why people might come to the oVirt website. The sitemap
details that even better, and I think the latest version is very good.
On 08/16/2012 07:17 PM, Garrett LeSage wrote:
The website mockup is at:
http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/mockup-1/
(This is simply a static PNG exported from Inkscape, wrapped in a very
simple HTML page. Therefore, don't expect it to scale with your browser,
have selectable text, etc.)
The mockup has many different sections and updates, and I will explain
each change, as well as the thought process that went into each, below.
I agree with Mike that it's a bit text heavy, but that's something we
can fix pretty easily. The key bits are the top of the front page (great
call to action), and the way we address the key use-cases for a website:
* Find out more about oVirt
* Get and try out oVirt
* Get help when I have a problem
* Tell the developers about a problem/suggest an improvement (broadly,
"get involved")
* Learn about the code and architecture/build development
versions/propose a patch (broadly: "Develop")
= Site structure =
A revised site structure is hinted at in the front page mockup. You can
see this reflected in the top navigation. I did some overall
categorization, strongly influenced by Dave Neary's pre-existing work on
the topic.
You can see a proposed sitemap here:
http://people.redhat.com/glesage/oVirt/website/ovirt-sitemap.txt
This is a general grouping of types of content, not necessarily a view
of the top-level page, or of sub-pages. In some cases, these items would
be sub-level pages, in others, they would be part of the navigation page.
The documentation page would highlight the best documentation available,
regardless of format - e.g. wiki, blog posts, etc. - and also have a
prominent link to the wiki. Other sub-pages may also link to the wiki,
if there is pertinent information (such as live docs for developers,
linked to from the develop section).
As Livnat said, I think that Download is an important word to have
there. I think we can do better than "Documentation" though - that's
pretty broad, how about a "Get help" header, which points to user
documentation, a FAQ, and points people to the IRC channel and users@
mailing list for in-person help?
I think "Developers" is good enough - developers know what that means,
and we can add links to developer documentation, source code, patch
review tools, Jenkins, etc there.
Personally, I also think that "Community" isn't very clickable - I'd
prefer to have some kind of call to action: "Get involved" or "Talk to
the community" or something... I have no really good ideas, because I
can imagine (say) someone who wants to talk to the community to suggest
a feature, but who doesn't want to get involved as such.
That section could point to mailing lists, how to edit a wiki page, help
work in the bug tracker, and various information about future versions,
release and infrastructure management, how to propose a feature, joining
devel mailing lists, etc.
I imagine that we could end up with a "Documentation" section for each
of users, developers and non-developer contributors.
= Front-page sections =
The order of the front-page sections is important too. A goal with this
design was to:
1) Introduce people to oVirt, with a simple explanation
2) Let people know right upfront that it's an active project (release
blurb)
3) Detail some of the most important features
4) Make it clear that it's a community project
5) Provide timely news & a way to easily get more info
6) Publish information on upcoming oVirt-related events (currently, in the
mockup, there's filler text for the time being)
Items #5 & #6 should both have a way to subscribe so that someone could
access this information without visiting oVirt.org. Twitter solves the
news component for us; we have to make sure the calendar is able to be
subscribed to as well.
I think we can show some more activity (or different) on the front page
too - I don't know if we have active bloggers among the team, but
certainly we could feed blogs as well as Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc.
content into an RSS aggregator, in addition we also have all of the
activity (actual work!) going on in the projects - is there a way we can
use Bugzilla, Gerrit, Jenkins, git (or the commits list) and wiki recent
changes to populate an activity view?
Thanks for reading all of this! I'm looking forward to all
conversations, especially if it's constructive (regardless of a
positive, negative, or neutral slant).
Thank you garrett! I appreciate the effort you've put into this, and if
we put it as-is on ovirt.org now, I'd be happy. There's some room for
improvement, but it is a great start.
Thanks!
Dave.
--
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13