Jobs - Redesign Maven website

Job Postings
1

Role: Webdesign / templating

Deliverables:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/jobs/2017-07-21-redesign-maven-website
2

FTR: More initial discussions can be found in the GitHub issue https://github.com/opensourcedesign/jobs/issues/246

  • Current design

  • (i1) Homepage + Documentation Skin mockup, more screenshots

  • (i2) Homepage content alternative wireframe

Let continue the work and contributions here.

3

for incremental tests of little improvements that the full redesign discussion may find, current site code is available on GitHub, and its skin (the template) is also available on GitHub with its associated Maven Fluido Skin documentation.

One first idea I see from the wireframe is that we’d need to be able to have front page without left menu, while having the rest of the page with the menu: I’ll see how to make this possible in maven-site-plugin, I just opened MSKINS-138 on the topic

On the skin, there are some improvements that come to my mind that could improve UX on the current site:

On content organization, there are multiple profiles with specific needs:

  • people just needing to build a project with Maven,
  • people needing to configure a Maven build for their own project (configuring Maven plugins);
  • people wanting to create their own Maven plugins
  • perhaps people wanting to create an Maven archetype or a Maven Site skin
  • people wanting to use repositories and publish to Central repository (eventually without Maven)
  • people wanting to contribute to Maven
2 Likes
4

IIRC statistics say most people still use the desktop to visit this site, so that should still have the main focus regarding UX.

If we want to put these topics on the landing page, I prefer to reduce it to something like:

  • using Maven (build a project + configure it)
  • extending Maven (create X)
  • contributing

publishing to Central sounds like a FAQ. Maybe (Maven) Central is a global topic as well, not just the publishing part.

5

IIRC statistics say most people still use the desktop to visit this site

did you ever try to visit the site with something else than a desktop? That would perfectly explain why there are only desktops: it’s completely unusable.

Honestly, I’m convinced desktop is the main target (it’s a build tool), but having something usable when not on desktop would be useful for people just occasionally looking for info

For the 3 profiles, yes, I imagine we can summarize like that

6

Hi, finally had some time to work on this, I made a content inventory of the Apache identity ecosystem:

Apache Maven Logo-01
We can see that some of them use Apache as part of the logo, I’m partial to making the Maven logo along the lines of the Solr, Struts, Cordova, Spark or Flex.

I think it could help to break the project down:
1.- Start with the logo
Too establish the identity, and after that
2.- Work on a mood board to settle on colors and a theme around the identity,
Next step:
3.- Mockups
Thanks to @hboutemy for already describing the kind of users and their specific needs, that’s great :smiley:
What do you think?

7

notice we have a mascott that is currently a little bit hidden: Maven Owl

We already discussed about adding it to the logo and chose not to do: it’s juyst a mascott. But integrating it nicely somewhere would be useful

On redesigning a logo, previous attempts on creating a consensus was hard and give following conclusion: Maven logo
I fear revisiting the logo will give a hard work

I’m more convinced of the color theme idea

8

While I’m no designer, I have created the wicket.apache.org website and figured to try and give my take on the Maven project. I’m a fan of maven, though my relationship with it is complicated :wink:

As a long time user of Maven, the thing that I remember most is that the website looks too cluttered and doesn’t provide the most important information to the prospected user: what is it exactly, the benefits for me, pointers to the most commonly used resources (docs, get started, downloads and community).

This design puts that information to the front and center: what is Maven, what is the most recent news, what are the benefits and where can I find more information. Gone is the endless list of links to the most remote outpost of features, but that should move behind a click with an overview.

Note that this is only two pages: the front and a content page for getting started. If this is a direction you’d like to go, I can mock up more.

002001

2 Likes
9

I like the structure of the homepage and the areas.

10

I’ll work this weekend on the website wireframes,
and had these two in the back burner and wanted to share them, if anyone likes them let me know :slight_smile:

T-Shirt MockUp_Front
note: just noticed the apache text is way too high, need sleep.

2 Likes
11

btw, how can I get email notifications?
I thought the thread was gathering dust, and only by chance I remembered to visit the website again and saw a lot of new comments.
Thanks

12

A couple of weeks ago I joined a hangout with the XWiki team. Long story short: Maven generates quite some static pages and there’s no real need for dynamic pages right now. So we probably shouldn’t focus on solutions like XWiki can provide.
It seems like the templates provided by @dashorst are more in line with the requirements.

13

I’ve done some additional work on more pages.

Home page:
001

Documentation landing page:
002

Getting started:
003

Projects landing page
004

Example project:
005

Drop down menu from example project:
006

3 Likes