Re: [Firebird-website] Main page redesign

[Alexey K. <ak...@ib...>]

Hi Dmitry, Jiri,

I think we should seriously shrink the top menu and banners, and put in 
top menu only links which are really important for us - that we really 
want to be clicked, not just "good to have".

Other things should be accessed through search or extended left menu on 
level-2 pages.


> - i.e. About Firebird and Documentation could be under one link,

Jiri, I tend to agree that About Firebird is pretty useless, and it will be fine if logos and licenses will be under Documentation.

However, Documentation itself should be tweaked - the entrance page for Documentation looks confusing (even for me), so any suggestions specifically for Documentation are welcome (but let's start separate thread for it).


> similar with Support/Community/Development

This is more complex.
If you can provide a good word to put Support, Community and Development under the single umbrella, please propose it.


> - Case Studies are already in right panel

agree.
I must admit that case studies project occurred to be much more complex, since it is unbelievably difficult to convince end-users to fill out the template of case study. In the future we will change the focus to testimonials instead. It also requires separate thread to discuss.


>
>I think we need some horizontal bar on the top, between "You are here"
>and the page contents. But not a tall one with tabs/pages like we had
>before, rather a shorter one implemented as direct hyper-links to some
>"hot" pages, e.g.:

>Donate (*) | Issue Tracker | Roadmap | @ GitHub | etc

Dmitry, I think we'd better make these links (+ Download) as top menu, and put the tree-view structure of the site to the detailed left menu on level 2 pages.

> (*) I see "Join Firebird!" at the bottom, but given this is about
> collecting money it should rather be more visible and located at the top.

Now Join Firebird leads to Become a member of Foundation, there are several steps before money, so probably Donate and Join Firebird are different.
Certainly we can try to implement Join Firebird in several visible places, and check what will be the conversions to the new members.


>In this case, page-level top banners "Contributing to Firebird" and
>"Tracker" can be removed, together with "Latest Release" (I don't see
>much sense in this one).

I think that these banners should be removed anyway - they only pollute the attention and make navigation more complex.


Regards,
Alexey











Regards,
Alexey





> I would remove the whole "Contact Us/Site Map/Search" part. It's taking
> space for no IMO real value.
>
> The main navigation bar contains IMO too much links.
>    - i.e. About Firebird and Documentation could be under one link,
>    similar with Support/Community/Development
>    - Case Studies are already in right panel
>
> I really don't see "mobile" version. If something like that exists in
> 2016. I would rather like to see responsive design/layout.
>
> Are we talking only about the home page? Or other pages as well?
>