new design: request for comments

[Dave Neary]

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