Gervase Markham wrote:
> My view would be:
>
> News on the front page
>
> 7 items in the sidebar (mindful of mpt's maxim that eight is the max.)
>
> Start Here - Use cases for the website
> About - organisation, project, positioning
> Status - reports, roadmaps, and an overall summary
> Distributions - ours, Netscape, Beonex, SVG, BeOS etc.
> Hacking - as before
> Community - resources (ngs, IRC)
> Get Involved - all different ways
I thinks this is a good choice for the front page. It is focused on active
participation, whereas my suggestion was based on a "reference" approach.
We both agree that there should be an "About" item near the top, and
splitting "meta" information about using the website into a separate item
seems logical, and may be a usability improvement.
You have a good point that a "News" item doesn't really make much sense if
the front page _is_ the news page; calling it "Status" and making it subsume
the roadmap is fine. The links from the "news.html" page (Newsbot etc.) could
be integrated there, or better not?
Next in the list you have dropped the "Projects" item. After having another
look at that page, it looks like the right thing to do: Less confusion
because most of the projects are related to Seamonkey anyway, and the few
that are unrelated probably won't mind not being mentioned in a toplevel menu
item if they are mentioned e.g. in the about page. But we should have their
consent before dropping this item. Anyway, there should be a systematic
"reference" directory of all information on mozilla.org somewhere, and the
projects page certainly would survive there. What do others think about this?
Next we both have an item for "getting the software". I'm all for mentioning
other distributions there, and calling the menu item "Distributions" instead
of "Download" or "Software" may be a good idea, I don't know.
Then you have dropped the "Bug Reports" item. I'm a little surprised about
that since you are the maintainer of the QA pages :) The original reason for
having such an item was that "Testing" (->quality) is one of the main items
in the current menu, and it is important to most people who download mozilla.
The term "Bug Reports" seems a bit more "catchy" than "Testing", "QA",
"Quality" etc., and since the "bugs/" page has a links to "quality/help/",
"quality/" and all the other important bugs pages, the term "Bug Reports"
seemed to be a good choice.
If this item is dropped, then the section about downloading the mozilla
binaries should definitely mention these resources. I can see that it makes
sense not to have this item in its current form on the front page when the
previous item points to "external" distributions from Netscape etc. (after
all, we don't want Netscape bugs :). But this could be solved by making the
"Bug Reports" page have the same structure as the "Distributions" page: For
each distribution mentioned there, it could describe and link to the
appropriate bug reporting facilities.
Another reason for not having this as a front page menu item could be that
some people think we have "enough" bugs already. But this is questionable: it
is already difficult enough to report a bug, so we shouldn't make it any
harder to find the resources IMO.
Next in the list, you have replaced "Developer Docs" with "Hacking". While I
agree that "Hacking" is a valuable resource, I think that the "docs" page is
an even more important place on mozilla.org (e.g. supported by the fact that
"Developer Docs" is one of the main items in the current menu): it has tons
of valuable information and links to all important tools. If the "docs/" item
is dropped, then the "Hacking" page should at least link to it, and the
"Start Here" page should contain pointers to the "web developer" and "user"
parts of the documentation. But I'd prefer it if "docs" could stay as a menu
item. Maybe add a link to the "Hacking" page at the beginning of "Docs"?
Dropping the "Tools" item entirely from the menu is fine if it's mentioned on
a "systematic reference directory" page and that page is mentioned somewhere
in a way that it can't be overlooked. :)
The "Community" item is probably a good implementation of the abstract
"People, Companies etc." (Actors) category. If the following links were added
to that "Community" page, that would be perfect:
* a link to "Who we are"
* links to the involved companies (as long as they don't mind being mentioned
there)
* links to related sites like mozillazine,
and maybe
* a link to http://www.mozilla.org/credits/ and
* a link to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/mozilla-testers.html
And finally "Get Involved" is back. That's fine because I think that's really
important, and I already had second thoughts when I dropped it. BTW, the
"Hacking" document is already linked from there, so it may be unnecessary to
have "Hacking" as a menu item.
And last but not least: FAQ & Search. You do not mention them, but I assume
you are ok with putting a link to the Search page or a search form somewhere
on the front page.
So our suggestions are similar enough that it's possible to generate a
"diff", as I have shown above. The one additional question I have is: Should
the front page menu be usable as a menu for all other pages on mozilla.org,
or isn't that necessary? Does it matter?
Andreas
