[Marketing] Website Redesign

[Jody Garnett]

Jason Birch wrote:
> I disagree :)
>
> It's not about content or graphic design, it's about user experience and
> findability.  A redesign has to be primarily about ensuring that the
> site functions as well as possible.   You can have all of the content in
> the world, or the prettiest site in the world, but they are both useless
> if users can't immediately access the information they need.  The most
> important part of a site design is knowing who your users are, what they
> are looking for, and figuring out how to get them to it faster.
>
> Any redesign needs to start from a document like this (unfinished?):
>   http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/WebCom_OSGeo_Site_Focus
> and be informed by accurate and intensive analysis of the web site's
> current traffic patterns.  I don't think that we have the latter, and
> would recommend something like Google Analytics for proper analysis.
> The open source traffic analysis tools do not offer nearly the insight
> that can be gained through Analytics, especially with its new custom
> reports and segmentation features.
>   
The document stalled (for which I apologize) since I was not involved in 
the correct committee at the time. It would be very helpful to have 
current traffic patterns; however we are going to be a bit limited by 
what is currently available on the website. Many of the "stories" 
mentioned above reflect the needs of users who exist only in my head 
(with a few exceptions).

We may do well to look at google trends or something; or talk to those 
that have been attending conferences lately in order to update the above 
stories.
> And yes, finally, we may need a bit of a layout redesign.  My preference
> would be to drop the left and right menus from the main page, and
> simplify the user experience.  I think that the Mozilla Foundation is a
> good example of this:  http://www.mozilla.org/  Apache has gone part of
> the way with the "quick-button" links at the top of the page, but I
> think they could easily drop the second column on the right:
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/
>
> Notice that I didn't talk about colours, logo positioning, etc at all.
> It's about functionality.  All of this is well within Drupal's
> out-of-the-box capabilities.
>   
I am not too worried about the osgeo layout in that respect; I am 
worried about the member projects - I wish we had sorted this out before 
mapserver.osgeo.org  got a redesign for example.

Jody

PS. I had never met www.map-server.org before - how confusing.