Website restructuring

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Tue Nov 13 16:00:49 UTC 2012


On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 05:40:49PM +0100, Jiří Stránský wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> here's a mailbomb related to our website. If you're not interested, feel free to skip it :)
> 
> I'd like to follow up on Mo's recent pull request and also on the discussions we had on Developer Conference by proposing an update to the website structure.

I think this is a good idea.

As a small tangent, though, I think it's important that the Website
Cabal draw a clear line between short-term tasks related to keeping
information up-to-date (IMHO, our main goal) and longer-term projects to
make the website better and easier-to-use. Both are quite important, and
we should definitely work on the site's structure. (And some other
stuff.)

You're not suggesting anything to the contrary, of course. It's just
something in the back of my mind that your email gave me occasion to
bring up. :)

> Here is what I would like to have as main menu items:
> 
> * Home - what we have now, with a bit revisited content.

"Homepage revamp" might be a valid sub-project in its own right.

> * Projects - the thing that Mo has done. We have so many components now that people deserve a special page just to get the 3048 meter (ten thousand foot) view of Aeolus.

https://redmine.aeolusproject.org/redmine/projects/aeolus/wiki/Aeolus_Components
has some overlap too, I think, though it's more about what currently
exists.

> * Install - describe how to download and install Aeolus. "Get It" is fine too, but I just think "Install" is clearer and more common. Regarding content of the page, we should decouple it from Fedora, as discussed on the Conference.

+1

Does this entail squashing 'Get It' and 'Use It' into one section?

> * Docs - point of origin when you search for tutorials, reference guides etc., regardless of who you are. Link to our usage guide with screenshots, links to GitHub wikis (when we have them) of various subprojects, links to API docs. We should make clear what links are for what "persona". I'd differentiate here between three groups: Admins (Sam, the sys admin - installation and setup), Users (Dennis, the app designer + Carl/Bert, the infrastructure consumer - clicking and CLIing), Developers. -- Yeah, Mike, the develper persona might be useful :)

This makes a lot of sense to me. Though I'm not sure how to present the
personae information in a way that will be clear to new users, who
probably won't think of themselves as "Connor the Infrastructure
Consumer" or whatnot.

> * Contribute - information for everyone who wants to help. What stuff we need - helping newbies, updating tutorials, writing code etc. and how should people get involved (installation for development, finding easy "onboarding" stuff to work on, etc.).

We have really bad docs here right now, I think. So this could be good.
That said -- how many people are actually trying to contribute right
now?

> * Blog - feed from our external blog. (Or, we could move the blog to be part of the website. Not sure if there would be issues with this though.) We could get rid of News section, as Mo did in his pull request. I think Blog/News are largely overlapping and we might struggle to find enough items for News section alone. Or, should News stay, I'd let them be only on the Home page with some link to show older news, but I wouldn't put that into main menu. I believe this main menu item wouldn't be used much.

Can we just make this a link to blog.aeolusproject.org? That would, by
far, be the easiest choice.

> * Contact / Need help? / something else? - not sure of the name here, but the purpose of the page is the same as we have it now - document our communication channels, allow people to reach out for help or give feedback.

Agreed, though I'd like to give the Contact page some TLC since right
now I think it's kind of overwhelming. (IMHO).

What about the News tab? Does that just fall under the Blog and/or get
duped on the homepage?

-- Matt



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