Difference between revisions of "Eclipse.org Website Redesign 2014"

Revision as of 11:53, 22 January 2014

This document is a work in progress. We will use it to capture notes as we progress.

What Are We Doing?

It is time to re-design the www.eclipse.org web site. It has been many year (5+ years) since the last time we changed the web site look and feel so it is getting old. The goal of this project is to

1. Create a set of mockups and wireframes that show the new design. This will be completed by end of March, 2014.
2. In Q2 2014 we would then implement the design.

Areas of focus

• Provide a new "skin" for all of eclipse.org
  • Since eclipse.org uses the Phoenix framework, providing a new Skin allows projects to test the new skin on their content, and to migrate from Nova at their own pace
  • A new skin would ideally include: Phoenix skin, a basic Drupal skin/theme and a barebones HTML header & footer to adapt the look to subsites, such as Bugzilla, Forums, Mailing lists
• Header & Footer
• Home page
• First level Landing Pages (/downloads, /membership, etc)
• Content page (two and three-column layouts)

Out of scope

The following are out of scope of this project. It is not to say they don't need to be updated but not with this project.

• PMI Layout
• Other forges, such as LTS, m2m, LocationTech and Polarsys
• Marketplace and PlanetEclipse - we might update the header but not the overall look and feel.

Page elements

Header

Logo area

• The Eclipse logo should always be shown, even when running a promotion banner. The logo should be clickable and always return "Home"
• An area must be available for a promotion banner (such as: EclipseCon)
• The Logo area could include a Download Eclipse button, which would link to /downloads

Nav bar

• The nav bar contains links to important landing pages
  • Some of the elements in the current nav bar can be eliminated or included in others
    • Home would disappear, in favour of the always-shown logo
    • Committers and Users could be replaced with Getting Started
    • Resources could be part of Getting Started
    • Google Search bar should be condensed, perhaps using a magnifying glass instead of a big Search button
    • Other sites that cannot fit into the Nav Bar could be in a More... section (ie, Forums, Mailing Lists, Bugzilla, etc)
      • Google uses the 3x3 grid to indicate there are more sites

Other header thoughts

• Login integration would be nice
• Breadcrumbs, or at the least, map each page to a "parent"

Home Page

• Slide show at the top should focus on What is Eclipse: 1) IDE and Tools, 2) Projects and 3) Working Groups. Each of these three areas should then have a section on the home page.
• Need to have on the home page: 1) announcements, 2) community news, 3) advertisement area

Content area

• Provide 2-column layout
• Provide 3-column layout
• Provide one big free content area (home page and project pages who which to be creative)

Footer

• Nothing special here, yet

Technologies used

• Creating a new Phoenix "skin" is desirable to ease migration for EMO content pages as well as project pages
• Bootstrap?

Other sites

We've looked at numerous sites. Long pages seems to be quite standard. Some of the preferred sites seem to all have these elements in common:

• long pages with section breaks
• large fonts
• large titles, narrow paragraphs of brief large text and a More... link
• many icons / graphics